@Almo there's a little paragraph in the middle you might want to edit lol

but what a story wow

I agree with what has been said in the past day :P

@doppelgreener I left that bit in intentionally because it was funny. :D

and yeah that was crazy shit

it's another crazy story how I got any of those games to work at all.

I could use 3 sprites and keep 60 FPS

so I had to do other weirdness to get anything to animate at any useful speed.

Am I allowed to ask design-level review questions? Or will that get closed as opinion based or too broad?

What precisely is a "design-level review question"?

A description of a design, and asking for feedback. Like how code review is for general feedback on code, could I ask for 'general feedback' on a design level solution?

we typically close questions asking for "general feedback"; you can ask about a specific aspect of it that you know/feel has flaws but you have trouble figuring out how to improve

Ok

Sounds good

Is it possible to dodge having to include shader source in a finished product for OpenGL? In Metal, shaders are 'all compiled and ready to use, even before the application starts running, unlike OpenGL.' Typically OpenGL devs store the shader source in either external files or strings embedded in the executable and then compile the shaders at startup using IIRC glCompileShader. But can I get around this? Can I have precompiled shaders in OpenGL?

@user16217248 AFAIK, no, it's not possible to avoid with OpenGL. I'm not an OpenGL guru though. Why would you want to get around this?

@Almo I kind of want to rant about Dunia, but that might be "a career-limiting move" 😅

@user16217248 Note that the mapping between shader bytecode and shader source code is deliberately pretty direct, so even with compiled shaders, if someone wanted to, they could decompile your shader into reasonably usable source with enough effort. Security through obscurity is not secure.

Someone "skilled in the art" can usually figure out roughly what's being done in a shader anyway just from studying its output, so if you're worried about someone stealing your "secret sauce" shader code... I'd say don't. That ship has probably sailed.

If you're doing a calculation whose steps absolutely must remain secret, do that calculation on your server, so you never trust the client device with it at all.. That's the only way to be sure.

@DMGregory How can I use shader bytecode instead of shader source? It's not really that my shaders are secret, it's more that I want to optimize for size and eliminate the overhead of compiling the text-based shader code.