Rendering

Welcome back to another development update for the nCine, covering what has been accomplished in the last quarter of 2025 and the first half of 2026.

Most graphics programmers know about the concept of a warp (or a wave in AMD parlance). It is a group of GPU threads (or lanes), typically 32, though some architectures use more, that execute the same instructions in lockstep.

Lately, the development rate of the nCine slowed down a bit. I think it is normal for a project that spans so many years, and developed by a single person, to see some oscillations. This is why this article covers such a long period, a period in which there have been maybe a few new features, but important ones.

Yet another update coming after a very long time since the previous, apologies for that. Well, at least it comes packed with a lot of enhancements from the last months. 💪

After a very long time without an update, here comes a new one. It is filled with all the work done in the last six months. 💪

Today I upgraded my Arch Linux workstation with pacman as I usually do every day and a little surprise was waiting for me. After a long time in [testing], Mesa 20 came out of the [extra] repository, ready to be installed.

A lot of work has been put into the project as usual during those last months of the year. Plenty of new and important features have been added to the engine, many of them are related to extending the capabilities of sprite rendering.

Exciting news for this development update: a new supported platform! 🍾 Emscripten I remember playing with the idea of porting the nCine to Emscripten years ago. After all I had every requirement in place: I used OpenGL ES for Android, GLFW and SDL2 as input backends, OpenAL and Vorbis for audio, libpng for images and already supported a POSIX API.

It has been a month and a half of small but useful updates for the nCine. LibPNG The PNG image loader has been modified to support more color types, by copying some code from the libpng example. It means that any nCine game is now able to properly load PNG images with palette or with gray-alpha channels and to expand or strip bit depths that are different than the standard 8 bits.

Plenty of work has been done during these few last months as I decided once again to update the engine renderer. This time it went from using OpenGL 2 and OpenGL ES 2 to 3.3 and 3.0 respectively.

During June and July 2017 I have been working as usual, in my spare time, on the project. 😉 The first big June addition has been the automatic screen culling of sprites, a very important feature needed in order to support games extending on multiple screens. The culling works on sprites of any kind (regular ones, particles, text nodes) and regardless of their scaling or rotation parameters. If those sprites are completely outside of the screen they will just not be rendered, saving draw calls from being issued.