New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Hit a wall with my ongoing game project because of patents
Ask HN: Hit a wall with my ongoing game project because of patents
4 by AndrewPGameDev | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I've been working on a custom renderer that uses compute shaders to do pathtracing. The idea was to use Rust/WASM/WebGPU so I could upload a demo directly to the web, so people could play it as easily as clicking a link. Additionally I thought that I could achieve acceptable performance with a combination of new techniques and algorithms as well as using lower-fidelity textures+meshes. Over the past 1.5 years I've basically read every single raytracing paper published in the past 10 years, and have been slowly working to implement relevant papers into this renderer. Recently I found out that one of those papers was patented, and there's no way to use the ideas inside it[1]. This by itself is not a huge issue as I can avoid using the technique and I don't think it will have a massive impact on performance. The bigger issue is that I don't know what other algorithms are patented that I have no idea about. Maybe some of those algorithms are just straight necessary in order to hit any reasonable performance guideline. In that case, this whole project is fucked and I should go do something else. I feel seriously disheartened about the whole thing now. I do not currently have any income, and I do not have enough money to fight off a lawsuit. Even hiring a lawyer to search for potential patent-infringement seems extremely expensive. I don't know if I should give up on this entirely and move to using a commercial game engine, keep working on this and ignore the existence of patents (except the one I found), keep working on this and search out for more patents to make sure I'm not infringing anything, or do something radically different altogether. [1] The patent # is 10580193, but I would not recommend looking it up if you are in graphics work due to how willful infringement works.
4 by AndrewPGameDev | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I've been working on a custom renderer that uses compute shaders to do pathtracing. The idea was to use Rust/WASM/WebGPU so I could upload a demo directly to the web, so people could play it as easily as clicking a link. Additionally I thought that I could achieve acceptable performance with a combination of new techniques and algorithms as well as using lower-fidelity textures+meshes. Over the past 1.5 years I've basically read every single raytracing paper published in the past 10 years, and have been slowly working to implement relevant papers into this renderer. Recently I found out that one of those papers was patented, and there's no way to use the ideas inside it[1]. This by itself is not a huge issue as I can avoid using the technique and I don't think it will have a massive impact on performance. The bigger issue is that I don't know what other algorithms are patented that I have no idea about. Maybe some of those algorithms are just straight necessary in order to hit any reasonable performance guideline. In that case, this whole project is fucked and I should go do something else. I feel seriously disheartened about the whole thing now. I do not currently have any income, and I do not have enough money to fight off a lawsuit. Even hiring a lawyer to search for potential patent-infringement seems extremely expensive. I don't know if I should give up on this entirely and move to using a commercial game engine, keep working on this and ignore the existence of patents (except the one I found), keep working on this and search out for more patents to make sure I'm not infringing anything, or do something radically different altogether. [1] The patent # is 10580193, but I would not recommend looking it up if you are in graphics work due to how willful infringement works.
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