https://canberkpitirli.com/blog Graphics programming, game development, C++, Rust, and systems design. en-us https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/the-16-millisecond-religion https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/the-16-millisecond-religion Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Game developers live under a law most of the software industry has never felt: 16.6 milliseconds, every frame, forever. Here's what that discipline looks like from inside, and what happened to the software that never had it. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/backpropagation-is-1451-lines https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/backpropagation-is-1451-lines Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Most people using deep learning treat backpropagation as a sealed black box. I implemented it from scratch for FastNN and counted: the entire autograd engine is 1,451 lines. Here is what's actually inside, math included. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/what-the-raft-paper-doesnt-tell-you https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/what-the-raft-paper-doesnt-tell-you Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Raft is famous for being the understandable consensus algorithm. Then you implement it, and you discover where the understanding was hiding. Notes from building raft-kv, a distributed key-value store in Rust with a core so pure it can be tested without a network. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/renderer-where-pixels-are-characters https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/renderer-where-pixels-are-characters Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Graphics ASCIIRenderer is a full 3D pipeline, perspective projection, z-buffer, Blinn-Phong lighting, that refuses to output pixels. It outputs characters, in color, to your browser, at 30 frames per second. Building it taught me more about GPUs than the GPU ever did. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/procedural-terrain-ue5-cpp https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/procedural-terrain-ue5-cpp Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Tutorials Slap some noise on a heightmap and you have terrain, right? Then you try to make it deterministic, seamless, fast, and editable by people who don't read C++, and the textbook chapter ends right where your problems begin. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/steam-game-at-14 https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/steam-game-at-14 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career Endless Combat is still on Steam. The store page says co-op zombie survival. What it doesn't say is that the gameplay code was written by a teenager who thought header files were a suggestion. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/rendering-equation-to-hlsl https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/rendering-equation-to-hlsl Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Graphics Every PBR shader you've ever written is one integral wearing a trench coat. Here's the rendering equation term by term, the Cook-Torrance BRDF that lives inside it, and the exact HLSL each symbol turns into. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/viewcam-devlog-chasing-milliseconds https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/viewcam-devlog-chasing-milliseconds Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering A virtual webcam that lags is worse than no webcam at all. Here's the latency budget of ViewCam's pipeline, where the milliseconds actually hide, and the embarrassingly analog way I measure them. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/virtual-camera-directshow-vs-v4l2loopback https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/virtual-camera-directshow-vs-v4l2loopback Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering To make Zoom believe your app is a webcam, you have to convince two very different operating systems. One asks for a COM object registered in the registry. The other asks you to politely write frames into a file. Guess which one took a week. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-i-was-inactive-for-a-while https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-i-was-inactive-for-a-while Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career The blog went quiet for three months and a few people actually checked if I was okay. I was okay. I was just buried under two jobs, a product launch, a Play Store approval, and a suitcase I need to pack for Japan. Let me explain. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-i-hate-electron https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-i-hate-electron Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Electron ships 120MB of Chromium so your app can render a button. I've had enough of pretending this is acceptable. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-cpp-is-still-king https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-cpp-is-still-king Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Every few years someone declares C++ dead and points to Rust, Zig, or some managed language as its replacement. They're wrong, and here's why it matters for game development specifically. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/handwritten-cuda-vs-pytorch https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/handwritten-cuda-vs-pytorch Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering I wrote a deep learning framework from scratch in Rust with hand-tuned CUDA kernels, benchmarked it against PyTorch, and I'm publishing the numbers including the ones that don't flatter me. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/shadow-mapping-dx11 https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/shadow-mapping-dx11 Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Graphics Shadow mapping is one of those techniques that looks simple on paper and punishes you the moment you go off-script. Here's the full picture: depth bias, PCF, and the math that actually makes it work. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/lessons-from-shipping-on-steam https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/lessons-from-shipping-on-steam Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career I shipped my first Steam title at 16. By the time the second one launched, I had a completely different understanding of what 'done' means and what players actually care about. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/unreal-plugin-from-empty-folder https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/unreal-plugin-from-empty-folder Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Tutorials Everything reusable I write for Unreal now starts life as a plugin, not a project. Here's the anatomy of one: modules, Build.cs, export macros, editor-only code, and the packaging step everyone gets wrong first. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/deferred-vs-forward-rendering https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/deferred-vs-forward-rendering Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Graphics Students ask me this every month, so here's the answer I actually give: the whole debate is one question about where you pay for lights, and your content answers it for you. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/cmake-for-game-developers https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/cmake-for-game-developers Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT Engineering You don't need to like CMake. You need the 20% of it that makes C++ builds boring and reliable, and permission to ignore the rest. This is that 20%, learned from building an engine with it. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/go-for-api-development https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/go-for-api-development Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Engineering I've written backends in Node.js, Express, and FastAPI. They all work. But when I need something that will hold up under real load without babysitting it, I write Go. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/one-engine-four-graphics-backends https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/one-engine-four-graphics-backends Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Engineering SleakEngine runs DirectX 11, DirectX 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL behind one abstraction layer. Building that taught me exactly why nobody should build that. A postmortem in advance. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-i-started-writing-rust https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/why-i-started-writing-rust Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT Engineering I spent two years telling people Rust was solving a problem I didn't have. Then I used it on a real project and changed my mind faster than I expected. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/vulkan-vs-other-graphics-apis https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/vulkan-vs-other-graphics-apis Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT Graphics The first Vulkan hello triangle example I read was 700 lines. OpenGL's is 50. That gap isn't bloat. It's everything the driver was hiding from you. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/ue5-behavior-trees-observer-aborts https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/ue5-behavior-trees-observer-aborts Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT Game Dev Every UE5 AI tutorial stops right before the part that makes enemies feel alive: observer aborts. I shipped behavior tree AI in a commercial VR game, and this is the explanation I wish someone had given me. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/occlusion-culling-20-percent-vr https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/occlusion-culling-20-percent-vr Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT Graphics The fastest draw call is the one you never make. On The Stranger, a VR horror game, culling what the player provably couldn't see bought us back a fifth of the frame. Here's how that works and why VR makes it hard. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/custom-memory-allocators-cpp https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/custom-memory-allocators-cpp Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT Engineering malloc isn't the bottleneck people think it is, until it is. Here's when you actually need to write your own allocator and which pattern fits which problem. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/vr-frame-rate-72-to-90 https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/vr-frame-rate-72-to-90 Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Graphics In a flat game, dropping from 90fps to 70fps for a few frames is a minor visual hiccup. In VR, the same drop will make someone reach for a trash can. Here's how we closed that gap on The Stranger. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/hlsl-from-first-principles https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/hlsl-from-first-principles Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Tutorials Most HLSL tutorials hand you a working triangle and call it done. You get a result. You don't get an understanding. This is the explanation I wish I'd had before I learned shaders. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/tools-before-games https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/tools-before-games Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Engineering The first thing I do on any new game project is not build the game. It's build the tools I'll use to build the game. Three shipped titles later, I'm more convinced this is correct than when I started. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/winning-best-game-contest https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/winning-best-game-contest Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Career The press release is the part you see. Clean headline, photo of the team, link to the trailer. Here's what the actual experience looked like from inside the studio. https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/shipping-first-udemy-course https://canberkpitirli.com/blog/shipping-first-udemy-course Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Career Plenty of guides will tell you how to make a Udemy course. None of them tell you what the first month actually feels like after you publish. Here's mine.