I’ve been working on my own game engine for years, and there’s all sorts of cool stuff it can do, but recently I’ve been expanding the scripting to be capable of streaming images to the GPU.

Today I got Doom running inside my engine as a hot-reloadable plugin script:
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-12-13_00-25-14.mp4

The engine has real-time bounce lighting using a highly modified voxel cone tracing algorithm I developed (doesn’t require ray tracing hardware), which I’ve been able to get running even on my Steam Deck! Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-03-21 23-50-29.mp4

The whole thing is open source here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons

A long time ago I wrote a little web app that takes a search string and finds all the words in the dictionary that have overlap with its spelling. Sort of a portmanteau generator. It was just a fun project at the time, but I have used it on countless occasions to brainstorm unique names for projects, websites, etc.

You can try it from the link below. Just type any word or name and it will populate the results.

https://dev.djdupriest.org/name-combinator/index.html

https://github.com/KiranWells/corgi

Like a lot of graphics programmers, I fell into the rabbit hole of rendering fractals. However, I never stopped - over the past couple of years I have slowly been building one of the most sophisticated Mandelbrot/Julia rendering programs that I am aware of. It has a mostly intuitive user interface, and does all of the calculations on the GPU. It has to use a bunch of mathematical tricks to get around the limits of single-point precision available in shaders. Because of the GPU rendering algorithm, I’ve managed to view fractal locations at around 10^250 times magnification with near real-time performance.

I also built a really in-depth compositing/coloring system, allowing you to make some really crazy images and get a lot of variation even for the same location:

Although it has only been me working on it, I think it is in a pretty mature state so far, and I would gladly take PRs/issues if anyone happens to be interested. It should support any OS if you compile it from source, but I don’t have binary releases set up yet.

Archery app. Basically zero users, and got purged from the play store earlier this year because I refused to jump through their hoops.

It was was meant for use with scopes, you would put in some distance and scope settings pairs into it, and it would fit a line allowing you to estimate intermediate scope settings.

It also had an AR mode, where you could save a targets GPS position, and get the distance and angle to the target, and the pin setting.

Sadly, never got any users. So its just for me now. And I deleted the AR stuff.

I wrote my own email service: https://port87.com/

I’ve made a lot of things for it, and most of them are open source:

• https://sveltematerialui.com/
• https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
• https://nymph.io/
• https://github.com/sciactive/tokenizer

Also, I made one of those neat sorting algorithm visualizers:

https://sciactive.github.io/libsortjs/demo/

I’m still proud of my rendering of the logistic map. It was mostly just to learn more Rust, but it rendered this beatuiful picture with relatively little code. And mostly by accident, I didn’t know I would get those cool shadows!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Hello World.

When Google Reader was alive, I wanted to improve its UI, so I wrote a userscript which completely replaced everything in the browser but still spoke to the Reader’s backend for data. When Reader was turned off, I only had to provide my own backend.

Not QUITE a program, but I’d have to say my own little GBA ROM hacks for the original Fire Emblem. On account of the following story…

IIRC, it was 2007, and I was a senior in high school, reorganizing some of the stuff for the robotics team, in the cabinets in the big science classroom where we met. There were some freshmen interested in the team (season wouldn’t start for a while yet) who’d taken to hanging out there, after school.

They all had laptops and I recognized the menu theme when one of them pulled up Fire Emblem in an emulator, from across the room, and immediately called out “Who’s playing Fire Emblem?”. When I went over and saw he was using Virtual Boy Advance, it occurred to me what I had in my pocket. Or rather what happened to be ON the flash drive in my pocket.

At the time, I didn’t have my own laptop, so my flash drive had years worth of random crap on it. And over the years, I spent a LOT of time tinkering with ROMs and VBA over the years. In addition to a few copies of different hacked ROMs and save files, I had a portable hex editor, and a LOT of text files with hex tables and memory maps and other research I’d collected over the years.

So, yeah, I pulled out the flash drive, said “Wanna see something cool?” and proceeded to apply many crazy hacks as I could think of, in the most obtuse manner possible, just editing hex values directly in memory as the game was running. Free XP, free items, end game equipment, sprite swaps, etc. At one point, one of them says something like “What kind of wizard ARE you?!”

It’s what comes to mind for me when you say “cool” because I like to think I inspired those kids to get into software and programming themselves, or at least consider it as an option. They certainly stuck around with the team for the rest of the year. Also, it inspired ME to really realize how much I’d grown just by tinkering and being curious, and how much you can accomplish through incremental effort.

My first project in Rust was replicating this paper because i wanted to learn rust but needed a project to work on because i hate learning from tutorials.

Of course, I had intended to go the OOP route because that’s what I was used to and this was my first time using rust… that was a bit of a headache. But I did eventually get it working and could watch the weights change in real time. (It was super slow of course but still cool)

Anyway I’ve started making a much much faster version by using a queue to hold neurons and synapses that need updating instead of running through all of them every loop.

It’s like lightning fast compared to the old version; I’m very proud of that. However, my code is an absolute mess and is now filled with

Vec<Arc<Mutex<>>>

And I can’t implement the inhibition in a lazy way like I did the first time, so that’s not fun…

In the 2010s I had a Windows Phone which I thought was amazing. I bought the original Surface Pro too, because at the time I thought it was incredible. A full operating system in a tablet form factor that was incredibly fast and touch screen.

In the IT office I worked in, we had a dartboard. It was great for just stepping away from your desk if a problem had stumped you, throwing a few darts to take a break, and inevitably the answer would come to you. It was our rubber duck.

Trouble was, all of us were terrible at the basic maths involved with darts matches. So I thought, what if we mounted the Surface to the wall, and could just tap where the dart had hit, and get scores instantly.

So I wrote this darts score-keeping app that worked on everything from Windows Phones to tablets, and even an Xbox at one point, thanks to the way Microsoft had implemented their cross-device app deployment.

We used it every day in the office. I think in 10 years it’s sold about 3 copies.

Lovely Darts

a bot that shorts any coin mentioned by elon musk.

Phone powered web server on solar more recently. Worked a lot easier than I thought it would.

Back in the day, I got the weird idea that it’d be handy to grab information from the XMMS music player as it was running. So I made an extension that basically dumped the information about the player state as text to a named pipe. A few people wrote scripts for their IRC clients and whatnot to tell others what they were listening.

(Back then, none of the GUI music players really had any kind of RPC capability. Nowadays, you can probably do this stuff easily with D-Bus or whatever.)

One time, late at night, I was just listening to music in bed with headphones, controlling XMMS via infrared remote controller (LIRC). A random cool track came up. I had no idea what it was actually called. I went “wouldn’t it be cool if I could hit a remote button and it’d say what song is currently playing?” …so I got up, got back to the computer, and wrote a script that reads the pipe, takes the artist and song title, and feeds it to Festival TTS, then added that to LIRC configuration.

I implemented a self made or at least adapted ant based algorithm to solve a mathematical problem. Each ant walks a route which represents a possible solution. The shortest path is the best solution. It takes advantage of swarm intelligence.