Cauldron v2 · lineage (nested cauldron-v1)

Oct 2003 – Jun 2006 · age 21–24

What it was

The three years of practice the 2006 Cauldron grew out of, told as a lineage. First came the 2004 mesh tools: weight blurring, normal correction, cache reordering, stripifying, a BSP builder and an asset packer, chained into a pipeline from MilkShape models to packed engine data. Then a 2005 SDL demo with GLSL, GPU skinning, a Klein bottle, IK chains and terrain patches, which recorded a video of itself every time it launched. Then Xaiv, a Win32 sandbox with Novodex physics, pbuffer mirrors, and a hand-written scene language of braces and tuples. Last came the June 2006 merge, when every library was fused into one build beside the first generated data model of 24 classes, and a dwarf scene loaded for the first time. Each stage ran while it was current, and by August 2006 all of it had been superseded.

Wins, for the age

At twenty-two, alone, Jeff built GLSL shading, GPU skinning, IK, instancing, terrain, mirrors and physics into one demo, most of it from first principles.
Wrote a scene language by hand before reaching for a schema, finding on their own the shape VRML had already found, and then went further within a year to a compiler.
Packed a 24-bit heightfield into an RGB texture the existing loader could already read. Small, cheap and clever.
Rendered planar mirrors into pbuffers, a technique later promoted into the engine's own mirror renderer. A mammal who needed sleep, bouncing light off boxes at midnight.

What it taught

Pipelines and their formats, learned in 2004 and kept.
How to reorganize: fuse everything, add the generator, split again. The June merge is where the architecture changed.
Turn off the recorder before shipping. Every launch of the SDL demo wrote a 1024x768 video until someone changed a boolean.
Delete dead rewrites and use a branch instead of a text file. Three abandoned terrain systems and a physics assert handler that ignored everything were kept, and little was organized.

Genealogy

Ancestors: none on record here. The roots are traced in the first Cauldron's own tombstone. Descendants: none on record beyond the engine it became, its own umbrella. Part of: Cauldron v2.

Epitaph

Here lies the lineage. Tools, then a demo that filmed itself, then a sandbox with a mirror, then everything in one build with a generated model beside it: three years of practice, kept whole because nothing was ever deleted.