sonicether
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Creative and personal update
🕑 Added 2023-06-22 01:04:28 +0000 UTCHello there! Wait... it's been how long?? Well, here's what's been going on in my world.
I have continued to work on SEUS, game development, and ReShade shaders, but development has definitely been slowed by mental health issues. Recently things have gotten better with a medication change, but I'm a little hesitant to celebrate too much; those of you who have struggled with mental health know it's never a linear journey. Also, if you've ever looked at my code, I'm sure some of you can tell I very much have ADHD. It can be a superpower at times, but lately it's mostly been a very frustrating obstacle, and I can't take stimulant ADHD medication. If any of you guys out there have ADHD tips, I'd love to hear them.
So, specifically about SEUS, I'd like to share a bit more about what I've been working on, although I should say that I'm still really unsure if this new tech will meet my goals in terms of performance, so I can't promise this will pan out!
I've been working on a custom software ray tracing solution that is able to dynamically and arbitrarily store geometry within the scene into a sparse data structure that is then traversed on a per-quad basis. This means a few really awesome things.
Firstly, the area in which ray tracing data is stored has been increased significantly. With the latest version of SEUS PTGI, the area is 335x335x335 centered on the player, which is about 10 chunks. So, anything further away than 10 chunks isn't captured and cannot be traced against. With this new sparse data structure, the volume encompasses the entire world height with a maximum distance of 32 chunks from the player! So basically, as long as your render distance is 32 chunks or less (which is probably more than most people should play at for performance reasons), the entire scene can be traced against! This has some performance problems with complex worlds or very high render distances. I'm thinking about implementing some LOD system that simplifies far away blocks/geometry to compensate for this. Past a certain distance, do we really need to store and trace against every single quad?
Secondly, yep, since ray tracing data is stored on a per-quad basis, all geometry is dynamically captured and can be traced against. This even includes entities! If this new tech pans out, PTGI will no longer rely on hard-coded block types and shapes. Any block, any custom model from a resource pack or a mod, and all entities can be traced.
There a few caveats. Since there is no single atlas holding the texture of all entities, entity textures cannot currently be displayed correctly in ray tracing. I have tried a few attempts at building an atlas at runtime but I haven't found an efficient enough way to do this yet. Also, there is a global limit to the amount of geometry data that can be stored, and there's a limit to the number of quads that can be traced against within a single block. That means that resource packs with lots of complex models with a lot of elements or extremely complex worlds will fill up this data and cause visual errors. I'm not sure if anything can be done about this. Also, for performance reasons, only quads that are rectangles (all corners are right angles) can be represented properly. This covers nearly all types of geometry encountered in Minecraft with one exception being the side of a flowing liquid. Storing geometry on a per-triangle basis essentially doubles the storage requirement of the geometry and halves the speed of ray traversing said geometry. Since this new ray tracing solution is already going to be slower than what is currently in PTGI, I feel that the rectangle-quads-only approach is best.
Arbitrary per-pixel emission is also working. Any object can have emissive pixels that will give off ray traced lighting. So, light sources simply work by putting emissive pixels on the object itself.
The exact speed difference between this new tech and the existing tech can vary quite a bit, but it is generally slower. Tracing one ray per pixel is probably going to be too expensive, especially when there is a lot of geometry present in an area. So I need to find a way to make tracing fewer rays still look acceptable. Per-pixel emission makes this problem worse, since light sources can be much smaller, and the smaller the light source, the rarer it is that any ray is going to hit that light (resulting in extremely poorly resolved lighting from these sources of light). So, we need a way to trace fewer rays and get better resolved lighting than PTGI has been capable of so far. The best option for this is ReSTIR, which is basically a fancy temporal and spatial ray sharing algorithm. My implementation is mostly done but not quite there yet.
The ReShade shaders are in a state where I'm not terribly happy with them, but I'm going to release them anyway as a very alpha version. I may just be creatively frustrated with them, if you guys end up liking them I'll definitely try to polish them up!
Once again, thank you so so much for your continued support!!! These past few years have been really rough for everyone. Your understanding of my challenges and acceptance of my unusual creative process is absolutely invaluable to me.
Comments
BigKid
You might want to check this out: https://www.ndr.de/adhstherapie100.pdf “Die Ernährungsdocs” is a bunch of reknown doctors specialized in treating chronical illnesses with the right diet - in case of adhs it seems to be possible to decrease the symptoms by about 40%.
DamnGoodTea
Hey, its been a while since this Post hope youre doing fine.
Personally, what has helped me immensely is not over thinking anything, but throwing myself into everything I have determined to do, for good reason: "Throw yourself into your tasks so that everyone will see your progress." And of course, even when I am weak then I am strong because we all should and are made to leave our burdens on the Lord Jesus Christ and instead take His: "28 Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”" - Matthew 11:28-30 (NLT)
que pija es esto
mastersquinch
as an artist with autism and adhd, whos been burnt out for like years now, I am going to try some of these suggestions
Michaelangel007
For ADHD tips I have found the following helpful: * Have a consistent schedule. * Time-boxing is your friend. * I like to listen to music without vocals since I find myself being distracted by the lyrics. This music is often categorized as World, New Age, or Meditation. * There are 7 F's of Success. Sadly, America has become brainwashed into thinking Financial success is the only one that matters but one needs to be balanced in ALL areas of their life to be healthy. Family, Friends, Field (work), Fitness, Fun, Faith, and Finance. i.e. You need to make time for both your family, work, and yourself. Work hard, play hard, enjoy life. * ADHD is an Executive Disorder -- you know stuff but it is like pulling teeth to DO stuff. This is a great video on YouTube called: This is how you treat ADHD based off science, Dr Russell Barkley part of 2012 Burnett Lecture -- that may helpful.
M.Sameed C
Hello Sir! I would like to have a conversation with you in private if that is possible. I will feel more comfortable talking. I am interested in some questions and since I am a texturepack creator and work on PBR textures this could help me know more about what I do since I started on my own. I also might be able to help you a little too since I am going through what you have been going through but a little bit less. I will be looking forward to your reply.
Hey! Love to hear the update and I’m a big fan of your work! Ok, so this might get lengthy and it's not letting me add line breaks so it's sadly going to have to be a single block of text which I'm horribly sorry about LOL. But hopefully you can find this helpful. I'm a project engineer working for a Fortune 500 company so I feel like I've been developing a pretty good system for keeping myself in the zone and managing my raging ADHD I've been diagnosed with since I was 12. So first resource I highly recommend is this https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/ioi1my/i_went_through_700_reddit_comments_and_collected/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button This resource was honestly life changing for me and I've been slowly incorporating one by one different things I liked from the list and I've seen my productivity explode. I really want to say I think organization is paramount If you struggle with that now. Finding an external system to build around your brain is going to be the best support you can offer yourself. Basically what I had to learn was to not rely on my brain to do any kind of remotely useful regulation of my actions. For instance I use calendars so I don't double book myself, timers for laundry, an app called sweepy to keep my place clean, planta for watering houseplants, giving everything in my home a "place" where I always put it every time. I've now found myself less scatterbrained and spend a whole lot less time every day looking for things if that makes sense. Creating timelines for how I want my day to be spent and creating daily checklists for me to complete and making the items as granular as possible to avoid me being intimidated by any of the tasks, etc. I'd also highly recommend this YouTube playlist which may have been shared with you. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wWGP8i0mAs-cvY This talk is maybe a bit doom and gloom but it's also quite honest which I prefer, take it how you will. It does a good job of explaining how ADHD can affect you and I've found having the knowledge of how it affects me allows me to preemptively mitigate the negative effects I can run into. Creating reminders to check in on friends to keep my social life healthy, starting my day off every morning by making my bed was a huge boost to my brain, it felt like I could get the snowball rolling downhill at the start of every day and genuinely feels the way a good cup of coffee feels to others for me. Basically you need to think of ADHD as having the engine of a Ferrari with the brakes of a bicycle. Thinking of the disorder with that context can seriously help you grab the reins on everything if that's what you're struggling with! A lot of this may not be new to you or you may already do all of this but hopefully something in there is useful!
