Devlog · Lux

Built in the open

The devlog

145 posts of what shipped, what broke, and what got deleted on the way to 1.0. Numbered in order; start anywhere.

Async Readback and the StagingBelt

Two render-layer perf fixes that each closed a sync stall on the hot path. The GPU readback loop stops blocking on device.poll; uniform writes stop going through individual queue.write_buffer calls. Net: 3 ms of frame time I didn't know I was leaking.

More 3D, More Filters

The cleanup post. Three new 3D primitives (Cylinder, Cone, Torus), a Twist3D mesh deformer, a SRT gizmo, plus five small texture nodes that shipped alongside the big render rewrite.

Image-Based Lighting

A sphere lit only by an environment map. Four compute passes — environment cubemap, irradiance, prefiltered mip chain, BRDF LUT — plus the split-sum sampling in the PBR shader that makes it all converge.

Cook-Torrance PBR + Normal Maps

A real physically-based shading model lands. Metallic/roughness workflow, GGX microfacets, Schlick Fresnel, normal maps with per-vertex tangents, and one SceneObject node that bundles geometry and material.

Post-FX: Bloom, TAA, CAS, and Film Grain

Four post-process passes, each opt-in per scene, each written against the new HDR buffer and the new framegraph. Jimenez bloom, depth-only reprojection TAA, AMD FidelityFX CAS, and a compute-hash grain pass.

The Framegraph

A new crate that owns the compile-time phase of the Lux render pipeline. Passes declare what they read and write, the compiler aliases transient textures, and bloom goes from three independent dispatches to one dependency-ordered chain.

Everything HDR

A new default texture format, a dedicated tonemap pass at the edge of the scene, and a pipeline that finally stops crushing every value above 1.0.

Particles, Finally

600 particles under gravity, an Emitter2D monolith with fourteen input pins, and a new --warmup CLI flag because headless snapshots of stateful nodes were broken in a way I hadn't noticed.

SDFs Without Writing Shaders

A graph of SDF nodes stitched into a single WGSL fragment shader at evaluation time. Drop a circle, drop a box, drop a smooth union, see the result raymarched to the screen. No text editor involved.

Prism

The idea at the heart of Lux, and the reason I started building it in the first place. Shaders are already graphs of smaller functions. So why are we still writing them as text?

Compute Shaders Get Real Buffers

A new compute pipeline cache that can read and write N storage buffers at arbitrary bindings. No visible output, but every GPU-side node from here on depends on it.

10,000 Cubes in One Draw Call

GPU instancing, a real BufferPool behind it, content-hashed transform uploads, and the stale-handle bug that took the whole thing down until I figured out which node had to own the keep-alive.

Lights, Materials, and the Sphere That Wasn't There

Lambert and Phong, directional and point and ambient lights, a std140 LightBlock, and six hours of debugging an invisible sphere because I wound every triangle the wrong way.

Boxes, Spheres, and Something to Point at Them

The scene you can actually build. Box, Sphere, Plane, Grid, a transform stack, a perspective camera, and orbit controls. Then the cleanup pass that rolled back half the decisions from the last post.

Lux Goes 3D

Phase 9 starts here. A new render_3d pass, a mesh pool with content-addressed upload, three new pin types, and a plugin that does exactly one thing: draw a triangle.

The Trust Pass: Autosave, Async, and a Progress Bar

Lux used to freeze when you loaded an image, freeze when you exported a sequence, and never tell you whether you had unsaved changes. This session fixed all of that, plus moved SolidColor and NoiseTexture fully onto the GPU.

Zero GPU Allocations Per Frame

The texture engine was allocating GPU resources every frame. Now it isn't. Plus a stack-allocated path for wire curves, a single command encoder per frame, and 16 tests that were overdue.

Merge, Multi-Wire, and the Death of Group Chains

One node that takes any number of layers. A graph engine that accepts multiple wires into a single Spread input. Drag-to-reorder layer ordering in the inspector. The ugly Group-chain pattern is finally gone.

Clean UI: Inspector on Click, Lucide, JetBrains Mono

The editor used to have two permanent panels eating screen space. Now it has none. Plus a typography overhaul. Lucide icons and JetBrains Mono throughout.

Export: Stills, Sequences, and a Real Output Resolution

Ctrl+E for a screenshot. Ctrl+Shift+E for a 150-frame sequence. An ExportImage node for programmatic captures. And an output resolution system that decouples what you render from what the window happens to be.

The Create Dialog and a UX Round

Spacebar opens a tabbed node creator. Plus four UX changes in one commit: richer inspector widgets, undo coalescing, copy/paste, and wire depth fading.

Save and Load: The .lux File Format

Ctrl+S, Ctrl+O, a proper .lux project format, and one sneaky bug where nodes were invisible after loading because the render cache didn't know anything had changed.

Smoothing, but for Everything

Damper, Spring, SmoothDamp, Ease, and Ramp used to only speak Number. Now they handle Vec2, Vec3, Vec4, and Color, component-wise, with output types that match whatever you plug in.

Finishing Phase 7

Six nodes the spec was missing, two GPU memory leaks, and a pile of small texture-engine fixes. The texture pipeline is finally done.

Video Playback

A VideoPlayer node with feature-gated FFmpeg decoding — MP4, MOV, WebM, anything FFmpeg supports — with seeking, looping, variable rate, and frame caching.

Extended Texture Processing

Seventeen new texture nodes across four crates — transforms, compositing, analysis, and post-FX including bloom, chroma key, tone mapping, and a seven-mode blend node.

Custom WGSL Shaders

PixelShader and ComputeShader nodes that let users write custom WGSL with auto-detected uniforms, dynamic input pins, and a hand-rolled shader parser that makes it all work.

Feedback Loops

A Feedback node that composites the previous frame with the current one — trails, echoes, and accumulation effects, plus the GC trick that makes it possible.

Layer ↔ Texture Bridge

Two nodes that bridge Lux's two rendering worlds — RenderTarget converts 2D vector layers into GPU textures, TextureToLayer brings them back.

Texture Filters

Eight GPU filter nodes — Blur, Brightness, Contrast, Invert, Threshold, HueShift, Saturate, EdgeDetect — each a WGSL shader wrapped in a single Rust file.