Nikoloz Donadze

An open-source game engine I'm building from scratch, primarily for educational purposes, which is slowly becoming a production-ready software.

The robust framework is built from the ground up using pure C++17, including all the abstractions for the graphics, physics, sound, and operating system APIs. Currently, the back end is built with Vulkan for graphics and PhysX for physics.

When learning about Assembly, we were using a generic pseudo-Assembly language that did not map to any existing hardware. Still, it served as a learning tool to explain and understand how high-level languages get translated into machine code.

I implemented basic software that took said pseudo-ASM code and ran it. The application supported file and terminal IO, and thanks to that, I managed to write a fully functional implementation of Catmull–Clark subdivision surfaces using pseudo-ASM. For clarity, it's the algorithm behind most mesh-smoothing modifiers in 3D modeling programs like Blender or 3ds Max. My code took one .obj file as input and generated another.

A GPU-accelerated path tracer built from scratch using C++ and CUDA.

The software can simultaneously utilize resources from any number of NVIDIA GPUs or CUDA devices and processor cores on the system, balancing the load optimally. The renderer was implemented before hardware raytracing existed, and its performance is comparable with the offline renderers of its time.

An application I wrote that lets users draw any convex or concave shape they want.

As the next step, it would internally triangulate the polygon in O(n * log(n)) time and generate a navigation mesh from it. Finally, the user could select any two points inside the polygon, and the application would draw the shortest path between those points that stayed inside the shape. Though it is nothing exceptional, just an anecdote from the past, algorithmically, it was pretty interesting and really fast. I will probably find some use for it in my engine eventually.

A game that I created at 17 years old. In the end, the game was working, but there was no attempt at marketing, and it remained as a Steam Greenlight listing for a couple of years before it randomly got accepted. Unfortunately, the game did not seem worthy of publishing anymore and was ignored.

Ultimately, this one taught me about the basics of Unity and general game development and gave me some 3D modeling and sculpting skills that I still use for my personal projects every once in a while.