(2019-08-08) Sloan Pentwater

Robin Sloan previews PENTWATER. This path tracer shoots just one measly ray per pixel, and there ain’t that many pixels to start with. It’s a path tracer built for sparkly noise. It runs smoothly in real-time—in JavaScript, if you can believe it!

*This is a visual mechanism powered by path tracing, guided (aspirationally) by the noise diary. It will be the “skin” of the project code-named PENTWATER, which is… not quite a video game? It’s a new kind of digital book (ebook), I think. Maybe I’ll just call it a video game, though?? I’m trying to get better at like, ~identifying slots~ for things.

In fact, PENTWATER is hardly anything yet; there’s an interactive text engine, a skeletal story, and now this: an aesthetic HELLO WORLD.*