Tech Blogs by Ta-Dah

• August 26, 2026

My Latest Blogs…

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  Drawing shapes in GLSL — notes from The Book of Shaders Chapter 7
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  September 2, 2026
  My notes continue on The Book of Shaders. This chapter is the first real jump in the series: everything until now shaped a single line (a value depending only on x). Shapes need two dimensions at once — a value that depends on both x and y — so I built a small 2D canvas to… Read more: Drawing shapes in GLSL — notes from The Book of Shaders Chapter 7
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  Mixing color in GLSL — notes from The Book of Shaders Chapter 6
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  September 2, 2026
  Continuing my notes on The Book of Shaders — this chapter moves from shaping a single line into shaping actual color. I built two interactive tools while working through it, since “here’s a gradient, trust me” isn’t the same as seeing it change under your own hands. Free playground Challenges colorA and colorB are the… Read more: Mixing color in GLSL — notes from The Book of Shaders Chapter 6
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  Dropping a MetaHuman into a Third-Person Template — What Actually Breaks
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  September 2, 2026
  I’ve done this before, more than once. Each time I had a working process — a set of steps I knew got me a moving MetaHuman by the end — but I’d never actually verified why any individual step mattered. This time I wanted to slow down: rerun my own process, but stop at every point where… Read more: Dropping a MetaHuman into a Third-Person Template — What Actually Breaks
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  CancellationToken.Register(): The Observer Pattern You Already Know
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  August 30, 2026
  Checking IsCancellationRequested works, but it only works if something is actively looking. A loop mid-await will notice eventually. But what about code that isn’t looping at all — a resource that just needs to clean itself up the moment cancellation happens, with nobody polling it? That’s what Register() is for. Instead of asking “has this… Read more: CancellationToken.Register(): The Observer Pattern You Already Know
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  CancellationTokenSource in Unity: Why “Stop” Doesn’t Always Stop
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  August 30, 2026
  Have you ever clicked Stop and watched your code keep running anyway? That’s not a bug. It’s a loop that was never given a way to check. It doesn’t ignore you on purpose — it simply never asked, so it never looks. Fixing this doesn’t require a redesign. It takes one object, threaded through the… Read more: CancellationTokenSource in Unity: Why “Stop” Doesn’t Always Stop
• Shaping functions in GLSL (A quick visual reference)
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  August 27, 2026
  I’ve been going through The Book of Shaders, and chapter 5 on shaping functions stood out enough that I wanted to summarize it. These functions show up constantly in real shader work — masks, transitions, procedural patterns, sensor thresholding — so I built two small interactive graphs to actually see what each one does instead of… Read more: Shaping functions in GLSL (A quick visual reference)
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  When Should the View Just… React? Wiring Observer Pattern to a Health Bar
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  August 24, 2026
  I almost didn’t need Observer pattern for this. A health bar is small — one int, one slider, one button. It would have been faster to just call view.SetSliderValue() directly from wherever health changes. That’s exactly the problem. “Wherever health changes” turns out to be more than one place the moment you add a second damage source,… Read more: When Should the View Just… React? Wiring Observer Pattern to a Health Bar
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  Retainer Box vs Invalidation Box: What 10,000 Updating Widgets Taught Me About UMG Performance
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  August 24, 2026
  After looking at draw calls on the GPU side with Static Mesh vs Instanced Static Mesh, I wanted to look at the other half of the picture: UMG. “Wrap your static UI in a Retainer Box or Invalidation Box” is common advice, but I’d never actually measured what either one buys you, or how they… Read more: Retainer Box vs Invalidation Box: What 10,000 Updating Widgets Taught Me About UMG Performance
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  Static Mesh vs Instanced Static Mesh: What 10,000 Cubes Taught Me About Draw Calls
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  August 23, 2026
  When people talk about render pipeline optimization, “use instancing” comes up as standard advice almost immediately. I wanted to actually test it myself rather than just repeat it. I ran a direct comparison in Unreal Engine and learned a few things along the way that the advice alone doesn’t tell you! The setup The test… Read more: Static Mesh vs Instanced Static Mesh: What 10,000 Cubes Taught Me About Draw Calls
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  Playing “Shellwood” from Hollow Knight: Silksong on Piano
  by @TadakuniYasuda
  April 21, 2024
  Every piece in Hollow Knight: Silksong’s soundtrack carries hauntingly beautiful, and quietly sad underneath. “Shellwood” stuck with me. I sat down, learned it by ear, and played it. That’s really all there is to it. No story, I just wanted to play this one.