With 2019 coming to a close I though it’d be nice to have a look back and see what I’ve been up to.

The hot topic for this year was clearly Ray Tracing, which has been a goal of mine for quite some time. I’ve spent some time reading Ray Tracing in One Weekend, The Next Weekend, and The Rest of Your Life which are great resources and entry points to the subject. I created a few projects on the subject with an SDL2 base game where I added multi threading support and calculating ambient occlusion.

I’ve started to use vcpkg ( C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS ) which is a neat little tool that allows me to easily grab libraries and keep them updated. No more issues with making SDL apps, importing Assimp, etc.

I started to familiarize myself with CMake. It’s still a hassle to get things working correctly on my first try, but I now have a couple of projects that I can look up to.

I forked my OpenGL sanbox and created a creativelly named Engine Sandbox project with CMake, used vcpkg for SDL, Assimp, nlohmann, etc.. I’ve been mostly fixing it, and working on neat new things, like Hot Reloading Shaders, investigating on how to Hot Reload Cpp code ( will need a bit of re-structuring ). I’ll probably make a new one next year, with a bit of planning to organize it better, but for now, It will do.

Vulkan: I started to read up on that, but after a few tutorials, and not getting anything on screen I eventually ventured of to other topics. Maybe someday i’ll come back to that. SIMD: I’ve read a few tutorials and articles on the subject. Data Oriented Design is another topics I’m looking into.
C++ Concurrency In Action 2nd edition: I’ve been reading this book, which has been on my wishlist for some time, and that naturally spun up a few projects.

I have many topics for next year, namely, GPU RayTracing, Bounding Volume Hierarchies and other acceleration structures, Data oriented design, AI Design and Control, more MultiThreading, and I’m sure that list will keep on growing.