A game in a texture. Pebble Devlog #1 - Compute Shader Game

A discussion of my work in progress game, Pebble, and how it's written. It's a 2D Falling Sand Cellular Automaton implemented in a compute shader. The vast majority of this project is written in HLSL, but a few core components are in a C# script.

Compute Shaders:

Falling Sand Resources:

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:00 Compute Shader Overview
2:03 Cell Material Texture
3:35 Reset and Mouse Input Kernels
4:23 Cell Movement Kernels
9:14 Character Kernels
13:19 C# Script
14:13 Limitations and Final Thoughts

[georgmethner]

i was stuck at the exact thing as you were with cells deleting themselves if swapping into the same place. thanks for the idea with the rng

[jarilynmonroe]

hey great work, I wanted to ask if a version of the code for this is publicly available by any chance?

[arez-dev]

Please, please continue on this! I got to a very similar point like you did (using GLSL) before watching your video and you gave me motivation to work on the project again. I would be really interested in the optimization possibilities as currently my empty cells (which check for other cells they could receive) are actually more expensive than a cell with a material. So I would be interested to see if you found another optimization yet 🤔

[notapplicable]

Very smart solution to the race condition problems

[Auxytocin]

texture shader locked ultimate unity-man challenge

[jarythebad]

Cool game! I think it would be better if you explained the goal of the game from a player's perspective. I also think having an infinite world is pretty cool, and you can generate trees, lakes, and stuff