Just a small rendering experiment that behaved better than expected

I’ve been playing with a small rendering experiment and noticed something interesting.
If you treat “depth” as a discrete temporal lag (basically: how many ticks ago an entity last updated), you can skip depth‑sorting entirely.

Instead of sorting, you just bucket entities by their lag value.
That makes the whole thing O(n) and surprisingly fast, even on pure CPU.

I paired it with a simple double‑buffer setup (CPU fills one buffer while the renderer reads the other), and the result is smoother than I expected. Even with tens or hundreds of thousands of entities, the frame times stay pretty reasonable.

Right now it’s all CPU‑rendered dots — nothing fancy visually — but the performance characteristics are kind of fun. It feels like the system “orders itself” as long as the lag values are discrete.

Still early, still just a toy experiment, but it was a neat discovery.

#gamedev #rendering #python #devlog #funproject