hack – hikiko-blog

A hack to instantly display the Vulkan CTS tests output

Vulkan conformance tests for graphics drivers save their output images inside an XML file called TestResults.qpa. As binary outputs aren’t allowed, these output images (that would be saved as PNG otherwise) are encoded to text using Base64 and the result is printed between <Image></Image> XML tags. This is a problem sometimes, as external tools are required to display them. In this post I’d like to share a few simple hacks I’m using to instantly display the CTS output image when I’m running a CTS test, hoping that they might be handy to more people who work on the drivers.

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Save the penguin! (Ludum dare jam 46)

It’s been some months I am only writing code for work (I am going to post soon about the cool things we are doing there) and have stopped the hobby projects. But this weekend (that was Easter for Greeks) there was a Ludum Dare jam with theme “Keep it alive”. Easter in quarantine was the perfect time for a break. 🙂

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A system to reject phone calls from my laptop

This post is about a system we devised and set up at home for me to be able to reject all the annoying phone calls I receive during the day from my laptop, without having to go pick up the phone. If you are also working from home like I do you might find this hack useful. 😀

Demo:

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Hair simulation with a mass-spring system (punk’s not dead!)

Hair rendering and simulation can be challenging, especially in real-time. There are many sophisticated algorithms for it (based on particle systems, hair mesh simulation, mass-spring systems and more) that can give very good results. But in this post, I will try to explain a simple and somehow hacky approach I followed in my first attempt to simulate hair (the mohawk hair of the video below) using a mass-spring system.