Jesse’s blog

Back when I wrote Final Flight of the Perseus for mobile devices (rest in peace, my poor abandoned game) I added a bloom effect to some of the enemy boss attacks. That ancient phone hardware didn’t have HDR texture support, so I did a multipass method, where I would draw the entire scene to one render target, and then just the elements I wanted bloom applied on to another. It worked well enough, but I figured it was time to revisit the topic. ...

One of the inspirations for starting this blog was Amit Patel’s blog, where he was recently writing about rendering SDF (signed distance field) fonts. I found it really interesting. It turns out, rendering fonts is pretty complicated. I had no idea just how much goes into it, as my first few games were written with XNA, which hid all of the complicated bits from you to make it easy to get started. Of course, most of us had no idea what we were doing and the results were terrible. Blurry letters from scaling prerendered bitmap fonts, nasty gaps because we didn’t have any kerning into, and (at least in my case) some terrible font choices. ...

In the spirit of journaling my work progress (as a way to look back at what I’ve accomplished, and to document details I find interesting) I thought it would be a good idea to make it a public blog. I had a WordPress blog before, and while I like the software and tools quite a bit, I found that it’s super annoying to be running on the most popular blogging platform, because it’s also the one most targeted by hackers. My old site got hit repeatedly by people finding a way in and changing my posts to include testimonials to products I’ve never heard of and to add links to other sites to boost themselves. While I’m sure security has improved quite a bit since then, it didn’t seem worth it. ...

I’ve decided that I should start writing up some notes on my side project dev work. Well, here goes… Lately I’ve been working on moving as much of my code as possible to using the new features of SDL3 when possible. Some of the changes are really great, and moving over means that I have to rely less on external dependencies which should make it easier to keep running in the future. ...