2025 and Beyond (Patreon)

Every year I look back at the things I've done, and it's never enough. There's so much more to learn and accomplish.

Let's look at some stats for 2024.

Youtube

After 2.9 million views and 57,400 subscribers gained, I'm 85% of the way to my goal of getting a Silver Play Button (100,000 subscribers). I haven't worked on a video in 8 months - I need to get my act together!

Patreon

2400 people joined the free tier and 265 joined the paid tier. Thank you to the 113 of you that have kept your membership, and a special thank you to Porff, zepofan, Onion and Grandy who have been here since 2021!

GitHub

341 commits, 1121 files changed and 74551 new lines of code. While I haven't made a YouTube video in a while, engine development has continued at full speed. And most importantly, I'm enjoying 3D development much more than before.

I've also shared some free small repositories to demonstrate various OpenGL concepts:

Drawing UI with SkiaSharp + textures

Creating terrain with gl_VertexID

Streaming textures to the GPU

Greedy voxel meshing

I also just noticed there are 172 active sponsors on GitHub, which is more than the 113 here on Patreon. What a nice surprise, I had no idea!

Personal

This year I moved out of home to an apartment that's a bit closer to the city.

During this time I:

Went grocery shopping 104 times

Learned to cook 6 new recipes

Trained at karate 68 times

Turned my computer off and on again 214 times

I'm also learning Japanese on Duolingo (172 day streak!) and recently found these artbooks I bought ages ago. They've inspired me to start drawing again.

I'm not an artist by any means, but I've bought a cheap XP-Pen drawing tablet (delivery pending) and I'm keen to try drawing plants like the ones in these artbooks. Then I'll use them as textures and create a lush 3D forest environment from them.

Plans for 2025

The engine has received a plethora of new features this year and the mammoth task of porting Sector's Edge to it is completed. Therefore... the engine is production ready!?

I love using my engine, but it lacks documentation and tutorials. I'm sure it's difficult for new members to use the engine, so I'll be creating videos, blog posts and documentation to help you out.

I've spent the past month cleaning it up and removing as much DRY code as possible, but documentation is also needed.

My engine wishlist for 2025 is:

Cloth rendering

Depth of field

FSR2 upscaling. DLSS is Vulkan-only :(

Compute shaders

Automated model export flow from Blender

Live reload - save Blender file, model updates automagically in-engine!?

Inverse kinematics!?

Raytraced audio

Virtual shadow maps

Vertex pulling with SSBOs

Clustered forward rendering

That's all for this post, I'll have some cool cloth demos to show soon, as well as an engine showcase video to demonstrate what this engine can do (and how fast it runs!)

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed on YouTube and joined this Patreon, I wish you all an amazing 2025!