Not Enough Triangles: Helio's Virtual Geometry in Action
What virtual geometry is, where it helps and where it does not, how Helio selects geometry per cluster on the GPU and rasterizes it in three tiers, and what the first measurements on a 777 million triangle scene looked like.
One Allocator for Space: Parent-Relative Worlds, Level Instances, and Portals That Light Themselves
A folder in the hierarchy panel that would not move its children turned into a rewrite of how Pulsar represents space. Parent-relative transforms resolved on the GPU, dirty-subtree propagation, camera-relative precision, rigid frames, one allocator behind portals and sublevels, level instances you can drop into a scene, and portals that now take their lighting and their materials from the world they show. This is how each piece works, what we measured, and the places where our own tests lied to us.
Four Tiers for an Asset: Residency, Derived Data, Cooked Textures, and What SceneDB Gave the Engine
SceneDB's asset layer held every decoded payload for as long as a component referenced it. Four additions fixed that without teaching the database anything about images: a budgeted rebuild-on-miss cache with single-flight rebuilds and prefetch, a derived-data cache on disk, a texture store that takes mip chains and block-compressed formats, and one that can adopt a texture another scene already uploaded. Here is how each works, why it lives where it lives, and what the engine did with them, with the cook that turns a 4K JPEG into 5.3 MiB of BC7 and a full mip chain.
There Is Only One Copy: Why SceneDB's ECS Looks Nothing Like an ECS
SceneDB isn't a gameplay-logic ECS with rendering and networking bolted on top. It's the only copy of the scene that exists. Physics, rendering, replication, and the editor all read and write the same bytes. Here's why that's the correct architecture and not just an unusual one.
SceneDB 2.0: The Cross-Device Spatial Database
A deep technical walkthrough of SceneDB 2.0, a cross-device spatial database that replaces the traditional push-model ECS with GPU-native columns, delta-minimal uploads, self-healing slot mirrors, and compile-time frame phase enforcement.
