Share your cool programs!
I’ve been working on my own game engine for years, and there’s all sorts of cool stuff it can do, but recently I’ve been expanding the scripting to be capable of streaming images to the GPU.
Today I got Doom running inside my engine as a hot-reloadable plugin script:
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-12-13_00-25-14.mp4The engine has real-time bounce lighting using a highly modified voxel cone tracing algorithm I developed (doesn’t require ray tracing hardware), which I’ve been able to get running even on my Steam Deck!
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-03-21 23-50-29.mp4The whole thing is open source here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons
Looks awesome! Been putting off learning voxel cone tracing. Time to read that nvidia paper again…
Software path-tracing has been on my bucket list, mostly to test a concept: physically based instant radiosity. If an eye-ray goes camera, A, B, C, then the light C->B forms an anisotropic point source. The material at B scatters light from C directly into onscreen geometry. This allows cheating akin to photon mapping, where you assume nearby pixels are also visible to B. Low-frequency lighting should look decent at much less than one sample per pixel.
It doesn’t use any mappers or added chips. There’s quicksaves, a level editor. jump-in two-player co-op, and SNES mouse support.
I have not been arsed to add music.
This is insane holy moly!
I only played it for 15 seconds, but I could hear the music anyway!
I wrote my own email service: https://port87.com/
I’ve made a lot of things for it, and most of them are open source:
- https://sveltematerialui.com/
- https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
- https://nymph.io/
- https://github.com/sciactive/tokenizer
Also, I made one of those neat sorting algorithm visualizers:
A long time ago I wrote a little web app that takes a search string and finds all the words in the dictionary that have overlap with its spelling. Sort of a portmanteau generator. It was just a fun project at the time, but I have used it on countless occasions to brainstorm unique names for projects, websites, etc.
You can try it from the link below. Just type any word or name and it will populate the results.
Bookmarked! I love that this exists
This looks handy for naming projects. Thanks for sharing.
Archery app. Basically zero users, and got purged from the play store earlier this year because I refused to jump through their hoops.
It was was meant for use with scopes, you would put in some distance and scope settings pairs into it, and it would fit a line allowing you to estimate intermediate scope settings.
It also had an AR mode, where you could save a targets GPS position, and get the distance and angle to the target, and the pin setting.
Sadly, never got any users. So its just for me now. And I deleted the AR stuff.
Woah! So you give it a distance and it estimates where to place the reticle? What sort of math formula do you use to estimate?
I’m still proud of my rendering of the logistic map. It was mostly just to learn more Rust, but it rendered this beatuiful picture with relatively little code. And mostly by accident, I didn’t know I would get those cool shadows!
https://github.com/KiranWells/corgi
Like a lot of graphics programmers, I fell into the rabbit hole of rendering fractals. However, I never stopped - over the past couple of years I have slowly been building one of the most sophisticated Mandelbrot/Julia rendering programs that I am aware of. It has a mostly intuitive user interface, and does all of the calculations on the GPU. It has to use a bunch of mathematical tricks to get around the limits of single-point precision available in shaders. Because of the GPU rendering algorithm, I’ve managed to view fractal locations at around 10^250 times magnification with near real-time performance.
I also built a really in-depth compositing/coloring system, allowing you to make some really crazy images and get a lot of variation even for the same location:
Although it has only been me working on it, I think it is in a pretty mature state so far, and I would gladly take PRs/issues if anyone happens to be interested. It should support any OS if you compile it from source, but I don’t have binary releases set up yet.
I worked on and created a lot of things, but when thinking ‘cool’, the fractal rendering I did a long time ago popped into my mind as well. It just looks cool, interesting, has variance and experimentation, and is very visual.
