Vrmac
re3
DISCONTINUED
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Vrmac
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New Renderers for GTK
Couple times in the past I have implemented GPU-targeted GUI renderers, here’s an example: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac?tab=readme-ov-file#vector-... https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/Vrmac/Draw/VAA...
2D graphics have very little in common with game engines. The problem is very different in many regards. In 2D, you generally have Bezier and other splines on input, large amount of overdraw, textures coming from users complicate VRAM memory management. OTOH, game engines are solving hard problem which are irrelevant to 2D renderers, like dynamic lighting, volumetric effects, and dynamic environment.
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Was Rust Worth It?
I think Java is only good for long-running servers.
Java doesn’t support C interop. For many desktop and embedded projects this is a showstopper, here’s an example https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo That C# code directly consumes V4L2 and ASIO Linux kernel APIs, and calls unmanaged user-mode DLLs like libfdk-aac.so and liba52-0.7.4.so.
Native stack and value types in C# reduce load on GC, and the number of complicated tricks required from JIT compiler. This in turn helps with startup performance. This is critical for command-line apps, and very desirable for desktop apps.
Another thing missing in Java is intrinsics support, both scalar like popcnt, bitscan, BMI, etc., and SIMD like SSE and AVX.
> Part of Panama
Most real-live C APIs are using function pointers and/or complicated data structures. Here’s couple real-life examples defined by Linux kernel developers who made V4L2 API: [0], [1] The first of them contains a union in C version, i.e. different structures are at the same memory addresses. Note C# delivers the level of usability similar to C or C++: we simply define structures, and access these fields. Not sure this is gonna be easy in Java even after all these proposals arrive.
For a managed runtime, unmanaged interop is a huge feature which affects all levels of the stack: type system in the language for value types, GC to be able to temporarily pin objects passed to native code (making copies is prohibitively slow for use cases like video processing), code generator to convert managed delegates to C function pointers and vice versa, error handling to automatically convert between exceptions and integer status codes at the API boundary, and more. Gonna be very hard to add into the existing language like Java.
> "Vector API" JEP
That API is not good. They don’t expose hardware instructions, instead they have invented some platform-agnostic API and implemented graceful degradation.
This means the applicability is likely to be limited to pure vertical operations processing FP32 or FP64 numbers. The rest of the SIMD instructions are too different between architectures. A simple example in C++ is [2], see [3] for the context. That example is trivial to port to modern C#, but impossible to port to Java even after the proposed changes. The key part of the implementation is psadbw instruction, which is very specific to SSE2/AVX2 and these vector APIs don’t have an equivalent. Apart from reduction, other problematic operations are shuffles, saturating integer math, and some memory access patterns (gathers in AVX2, transposed loads/stores on NEON).
> most of these are not done / not in a stable LTS Java release yet
BTW, SIMD intrinsics arrived to C# in 2019 (.NET Core 3.0 released in 2019), and unmanaged interop support is available since the very first 1.0 version.
[0] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...
[1] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...
[2] https://gist.github.com/Const-me/3ade77faad47f0fbb0538965ae7...
Projects Panama & Valhalla seems to solve all your complaints:
> Java doesn’t support C interop. For many desktop and embedded projects this is a showstopper, here’s an example https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo That C# code directly consumes V4L2 and ASIO Linux kernel APIs, and calls unmanaged user-mode DLLs like libfdk-aac.so and liba52-0.7.4.so.
Part of Panama: check out the "Foreign Function & Memory API" [0]. The official docs here [1] say it is a preview in 21 but it got stabilized in Java 22 (isn't out yet).
> Another thing missing in Java is intrinsics support, both scalar like popcnt, bitscan, BMI, etc., and SIMD like SSE and AVX.
Also part of Panama: see the "Vector API" JEP [2].
> Native stack and value types in C# reduce load on GC, and the number of complicated tricks required from JIT compiler. This in turn helps with startup performance. This is critical for command-line apps, and very desirable for desktop apps.
This is part of Project Valhalla [3], they're adding value types and actual generics, among other things.
That said, most of these are not done / not in a stable LTS Java release yet. We'll see how much better it'll be compared to C# (if at all) once all of these land.
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Stable Diffusion in pure C/C++
I have minimal experience with Rust. OTOH, programming C++ for living since 2000, with a few gaps when I used other languages like Obj-C and C#.
I agree C++ is very hard to learn if you only have experience with higher-level languages like Python and Scala. I think there’re two reasons for that.
C++ is unsafe. There’s no way around this one, it was designed that way, like C or assembly. Still, with modern toolset it’s not terribly bad. Compilers print warnings, BTW I typically ask them to treat warnings as errors to deliberately fail the build. On Windows, a combination of debug build, debug C runtime, and visual studio debugger helps tremendously. Linux compilers have these sanitizers (address, memory, thread, undefined behavior) which are comparable, they too sacrifice runtime speed for diagnostics and debuggability.
Another reason, the language itself is very complicated, especially the templates. However, just because something is in the language doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use it. You don’t need to be familiar with that stuff unless doing something very advanced, like customizing the Eigen C++ library. Don’t follow the patterns found in the standard library: unlike your code, that library has good reasons to use that template BS. If instead of templates you do something else, C++ becomes much easier to use, and most importantly other people will still be able to read and understand your code. Another reason to avoid excessive template metaprogramming, it slows down the compiler, because template-heavy code often needs to be in headers as opposed to cpp files.
P.S. If you don’t need extreme levels of performance (defined as “approach the numbers listed in CPU specs”, the numbers are FLOPS or memory bandwidth), and you don’t need the ecosystem too much, consider C# instead of C++. Much faster than Python, often faster than Scala or Java, easy integration with C should you need that (same as Rust, much easier than Python or Java), the only downside is these ~100MB of the runtime. The reputation is weird, but technically the language and runtime are pretty good. For example, here’s a C# library which re-implements a subset of ffmpeg and libavcodec C libraries: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo
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Media Player Element now available for cross-platform apps everywhere dotnet runs
BTW, I did that too for 32-bit ARM Linux on Raspberry Pi 4, back in 2020: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo Unlike Uno, my implementation doesn’t use libVLC and is written mostly in C#, only audio decoders are in C++. To decode video, I directly consume V4L2 Linux kernel APIs.
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Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell
Doing that for decades.
An app for Windows phone, downloaded 140k times: https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM
Cross-platform graphics library for .NET: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac
Recently, offline speech-to-text for Windows: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper
At this point, I consider side projects like that as a hobby.
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Minimal Cross-Platform Graphics
I think this needs much more complexity to be useful.
For the rendering, ideally it needs GPU support.
Input needs much more work, here's an overview for Windows: https://zserge.com/posts/fenster/
Windows' Sleep() function has default resolution 15.6ms, that's not enough for realtime rendering, and relatively hard to fix, ideally need a modern OS and a waitable timer created with high resolution flag.
Here's my attempt at making something similar, couple years ago: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac
- An MP4 file first draft
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Cppfront, Herb Sutter's proposal for a new C++ syntax
I agree about Python or PHP.
However, for Java or modern C#, in my experience the performance is often fairly close. When using either of them, very often one doesn’t need C++ to be good enough.
Here’s an example, a video player library for Raspberry Pi4: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo As written on that page, just a few things are in C++ (GLES integration, audio decoders, and couple SIMD utility functions), the majority of things are in C#.
re3
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Show HN: RE3 – Reversed Engineered GTA3 Source Code
This repository is a mirror by a completely unrelated third party. The original repo was https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3.
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What happened to the GTA Vice City native linux port?
It used to reside at https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3/tree/miami
- Exclusive: A fully functioning Zelda 64 PC port is ‘90% complete’ (VGC)
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Zelda 64 has been fully decompiled
Also re3 and reVC (in the same repo), though it is down for now, pending the outcome of a court filing... https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3
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Systematic method to reverse engineer and rewrite DOS games
I tried to check for GTA out of curiosity, but their code was taken down by DCMA it seems: https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3
- Remember that GTA projects that got banned off GitHub? Guess what? Rockstar just announced GTA Trilogy.
- GTA 3 and Vice City fully reverse engineered
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Take-Two is suing the creators of GTA 3 and Vice City reverse engineering projects | VGC
Funnily enough, they do supply some.
It's not; quotes from the readme on their github repo:
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Take Two has launched a lawsuit against all 14 of the developers of the GTA 3 and GTA Vice City reverse engineering project, after the developers submitted a counter claim against Take Two's DMCA (git link in comments for archival)
Sadly as /u/madjoki pointed out, they're likely fucked because there are infringing files.
What are some alternatives?
openrw - OpenRW "Open ReWrite" is an un-official open source recreation of the classic Grand Theft Auto III game executable
openmw-android - OpenMW for Android
luxtorpeda - Steam Play compatibility tool to run games using native Linux engines
xash3d-fwgs - Xash3D FWGS engine.
neutralinojs - Portable and lightweight cross-platform desktop application development framework
OpenRCT2 - An open source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 🎢
VitaDeploy - Toolbox that makes homebrewing the PS Vita easier
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
REDRIVER2 - Driver 2 Playstation game reverse engineering effort
NFSIISE - Need For Speed™ II SE - Cross-platform wrapper with 3D acceleration and TCP protocol!
vello - An experimental GPU compute-centric 2D renderer.
dmca - Repository with text of DMCA takedown notices as received. GitHub does not endorse or adopt any assertion contained in the following notices. Users identified in the notices are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Additional information about our DMCA policy can be found at