Definitely! I'm planning for more landscape features for next versions. I think rivers will be a great addition, and waterfalls/rapids sound really interesting too. In the end it's a matter of adding a few classes and designing some sprites.
My experience with writing shaders (such as for physically based rendering) is that the shading languages (MSL, GLSL, HLSL) are easy to switch between. The hard part is understanding the physics and understanding how GPUs work internally.
My main approach to writing shaders is to look at existing programs (e.g. Blender) and see what techniques are in use. The Google Filament renderer documentation [0] is also really good when it comes to BDSF functions.
Some papers from Unreal Engine might also help, such as "Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4" [1]
If you want to make nice looking materials and effects, you need a combination of good lighting (comes from the rendering engine, not the material), and artistic capabilities/talent. Art is a lot harder to teach than programming I feel, or at least I don't know how to teach it.
Programming the shaders themselves are pretty simple imo, they're just pure functions that return color data or triangle positions. The syntax might be a little different than you're used to depending on the shader language, but it should be easy enough to pick up in a day.
If you want to write compute shaders for computation, then it gets a lot more tricky and you need to spend some time learning about memory accesses, the underlying hardware, and profiling.
Wow this looks cool, I’m going to try writing a program. I have recently been learning about computer architecture (specifically older 8 bit CPUs) so when I read “There are no CPU registers” I was very intrigued.
Hey great app! I really like the “undo until unstuck” feature, I haven’t seen that before. Is there an algorithm for that or did you come up with something yourself?
“The strategy presented here is the basis of the computer algorithm of FreeSolitaire.win, which is used to select finishable deals, offer hints, and detect dead-ends. You also see it surface when you are told that The computer could do it in N moves at the end of a game.
This strategy/algorithm is quite simple. It does not require to “count cards”, i.e. keep track of which cards were seen in the stock. It doesn’t require to make guesses on where such or such face-down card must be located. And the procedure is the same all along the game; there is no special treatement of the opening or ending. It’s stateless, a programmer would say. […]”
edit: here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4