An array of structs would be a single contiguous structure in memory, while items in an array of objects (instances of reference types) need to be individually addressed by a pointer (i.e. a reference to an object on the garbage-collected heap). Therefore if you address large collections of items at once, structs will give you … Read more
I would not advise to try actual ray tracing in OpenGL because you need a lot hacks and tricks for that and, if you ask me, there is not a point in doing this anymore at all. If you want to do ray tracing on GPU, you should go with any GPGPU language, such as … Read more
The roguelike development community has a bit of an obsession with line-of-sight, field-of-view algorithms. Here’s a link to a roguelike wiki article on the subject: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Field_of_Vision For my roguelike game, I implemented a shadow casting algorithm (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Shadow_casting) in Python. It was a bit complicated to put together, but ran reasonably efficiently (even in pure Python) … Read more
I’m one of the rendering software architects at a large VFX and animated feature studio with a proprietary renderer (not Pixar, though I was once the rendering software architect there as well, long, long ago). Almost all high-quality rendering for film (at all the big studios, with all the major renderers) is CPU only. There … Read more
Based on my very limited understanding of what you’re trying to implement, it seems you would need to take the location of the intersection between the eye vector and the interior plane it hits, then trace it back to the light. To trace back to the light, you would first have to check if the … Read more
Not the solution to your problem, but a hint to the cause: Haskell seems to be very conservative in memory reuse and when the interpreter sees the potential to reclaim a memory block, it goes for it. Your problem description fits the minor GC behavior described here (bottom) https://wiki.haskell.org/GHC/Memory_Management. New data are allocated in 512kb … Read more