I wrote a game engine once over a 5 year period and used it for exactly one project[0] before acknowledging just how complicated it would be to maintain, given

I wrote a game engine once over a 5 year period and used it for exactly one project[0] before acknowledging just how complicated it would be to maintain, given the progress of other engines. I was constantly reading papers for new techniques, trying to decide if they were feasible, while trying to navigate the ancient-to-modern spread of OpenGL documentation and tutorials. In the end I'm pretty proud of what I came up with. I had blender integration so blender could be used to design my scenes, animations, etc, and exported via my custom engine format. I had a lua-based scripting language to design things that were dynamic at runtime. And I had a bunch of cool (to me) shaders, like depth of field, gaussian blur, and glow. I had some advanced techniques like light probes[1] that I (kind of) open sourced. The end result of what I wanted to accomplish though (a project) was different from what I was spending most of my time working on (the engine), so I had to call it quits eventually. It was an excellent learning experience though, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn graphics from the ground up. 0. https://www.arwmoffat.com/work/normal-distribution https://www.arwmoffat.com/work/normal-distribution 1. https://github.com/amoffat/blender-lightprobes/blob/master/__init__.py https://github.com/amoffat/blender-lightprobes/blob/master/_...