Research
Research & notes
Research notes and specs from what I build and explore: game development, generative AI for media, and the software behind them.
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AI short films: consistent characters and sets
Can 2026 AI video models make a multi-scene short film with the same actor and set in every shot? Where they fail, and the one architecture that holds.
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Atmosphere and dread: a second shader research pass
How atmospheric and horror games use height fog, grading, film grain and dread-driven effects, and what Babylon.js can do at 60 fps in a browser.
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Grass, wind and trails in a browser meadow
Why game grass reads as flat, what shipped meadows do instead, wind as one shared field, and what Babylon.js on WebGL2 can afford at 60 Hz.
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Stylized shader looks: how games build a visual identity
How games use shaders to build a distinct look, from ink outlines and cel lighting to dithering, gradient fog and VHS effects.
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No visible pop-in: dissolving a streamed forest
Keeping a streamed browser forest from visibly spawning: pixel-size arithmetic, screen-space dissolve bands, and what discard costs in opaque shaders.
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Why props float on procedural terrain
Why trees float on slopes and distant ridges in a procedural world, measured, and the shader and clipmap fixes that grounded them in Babylon.js.
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Pointer lock's Esc cooldown and an 8-byte patch
Chromium refuses pointer lock for 1.25 s after Esc. What failed in the browser, and how an 8-byte patch to prebuilt Electron removed the cooldown.
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Babylon.js material plugins: hooks and traps
Where Babylon.js 9.18 injects material plugin GLSL, what each PBR hook can see, and the silent failures behind preprocessor, comment and bake traps.
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An endless world as a pure function
Unbounded mountains, a warped coastline, a highway and cliff bands built as pure C² functions with exact derivatives, so every peer builds one world.
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Hosting WebRTC signaling on Cloud Run
Hosting a WebRTC signaling server on Google Cloud Run for a browser co-op game, the platform behaviours that broke it, and what a running match survives.
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Host-authoritative co-op netcode in the browser
How Day Hike's browser co-op stays responsive: a 60 Hz fixed step, redundant inputs, quantized snapshots, prediction, and host-created lobbies.