Blake Zonca

This is 100% baked lighting—no real-time lights and no mixed lighting. It's all done on the shader level where dynamic objects use baked spherical harmonics for seamless lighting without the performance hit. Perfect for fast, smooth VR action.

One of the best parts of making games is seeing a comment like this that reminds you why you’re building in the first place. Easy to get wrapped up in fixes, planning, and juggling life, but stuff like this is a nice reminder of the simple joys of development!

@BattleAxeVR Good point! Somehow Zeiss squeezed in there again somehow😆

@blakezonca In VR I can think of a couple major industry-wide "collective amnesia" regressions or stalls like this: fresnel instead of aspheric, LCD instead of OLED, inside-out instead of EMAG trackers When $15 Zeiss One VR shell looks 10x sharper + higher contrast than $2300 QPro = sadface

Some days I wake up thinking about how the Romans built a steam engine and then humanity sat on the idea for 1,600 years. Makes me wonder what else is hiding in plain sight or if the internet fixes that.

Evergreen

Eng here, I see it as an essential part of work, not an afterthought, because it allows me to perform far better cognitively. I start every morning with 3–5 hours of deep work, pushing until I hit a wall (getting stuck, losing focus, etc). That moment is my cue in the habit loop to go work out. I leave my desk, run/lift, and I’m back in 30-60 minutes. About 90% of the time, the solution to whatever I was stuck on becomes obvious the moment I sit down again. The workout resets my brain, and I can ride that momentum and energy through the rest of the day. The brain is complicated, but there’s something powerful about switching between high-cognitive/low-physical and low-cognitive/high-physical states. It feels like the two modes recharge each other.

engineers & founders, please share your advice for getting fit and staying fit while spending 10-12hr/day working on the computer.

@honeymoon250 It’s muscle memory for people who’ve ever played @playrust 😂

People who sleep naked do ya'll ever think about emergencies? What if someone breaks in?

@ArthurMacwaters This should be a new tradition! Every significant tech interview should have the company/founder/dev sword present.

> be founder > do media interview > show the interviewer your sword > ?? > profit?? can someone please explain this

@ChrisOlimpo Thanks!

@blakezonca This is incredible

This is 100% baked lighting—no real-time lights and no mixed lighting. It's all done on the shader level where dynamic objects use baked spherical harmonics for seamless lighting without the performance hit. Perfect for fast, smooth VR action.

What ever happened to Unity MCP's? They popped off in the beginning of the year with lots of promise but haven't seen anything big recently.

Been heads down working on @Gymclassvr lately and I’m thrilled to finally share one of the big things we’ve been building! A new lighting system that pushes visuals and performance to a whole new level! More VR dev goodness coming soon 👀

@aprolixian You either die a programmer or live long enough to blink a light with Arduino or 3D print a Benchy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Once you know enough software it seems natural to want to fill up the low level tech tree.

Why is everyone posting these dog water high school level microcontroller projects like they’re doing work

@cixliv I’ve always wondered about how 6dof VR would feel here with latency & mechanical constraints (IE: if it would keep up with a yaw & roll of the head with a position change). Definitely seems like a killer use case though.

The world is finally starting to see what I saw 9 months ago. The killer use-case for VR IS HUMANOID EMBODIMENT.

@yacineMTB The last chapter (You and Your Research) is worth it alone. There needs to be a hype video with Steve Balmer screaming it to show on the first day of undergrad.

Chat

@RuiCarrilho5 To be fair, I’m sure the others are good it’s just that when it comes to VR, Unity is really good with support and overall ecosystem.

@RuiCarrilho5 I’m extremely biased 😎

alright, I wanna dabble in game dev a bit. which of these three would be the best to start with to get something off the ground within a week or two?

@Tech_by_Ram Thanks! Probably not of used situationally. Especially for tactical combat, it could complement the core gameplay in certain areas making it more atmospheric / creepy.

VR high performance volumetric fog is looking great! Rock solid at 90+ fps. The shader reuses SH coefficients from the baked lighting volumes, so there’s negligible memory increase and supports any number of baked lights in the volume. Lots of potential with this effect!

@konzeptzwei @archrebels @r0bwiki Haven’t thought about it but I’ll definitely consider it!

@blakezonca @archrebels @r0bwiki Can we buy once it’s finished? I am using Kronnecta fog right now and it looks great but has a performance hit.

@archrebels @r0bwiki I’ll put together a test sometime with the results!

@blakezonca @r0bwiki would love to see how it runs for standalone!

@gdvhffguh Thanks! Volumes are baked at editor time for GI and SH coefficients in 3d textures. Then at runtime the fog volume shader accumulates the light value in a fixed set of steps between the camera and hitpoints based on the fog density (kind of ray-march like but more optimized).

@blakezonca Looks good, how did you sample the SH？