Despite the base IQM specification not supporting blend-shapes, I think
IQM will become the basis for QF's generic model representation (at
least for the more advanced renderers). After my experience with .mu
models (KSP) and unity mesh objects (both normal and skinned), and
reviewing the IQM spec, it looks like with the addition of support for
blend-shapes, IQM is actually pretty good.
This is just the preliminary work to get standard IQM models loading in
vulkan (seems to work, along with unloading), and they very basics into
the renderer (most likely not working: not tested yet). The rest of the
renderer seems to be unaffected, though, which is good.
The resource subsystem creates buffers, images, buffer views and image
views in a single batch operation, using a single memory object to back
all the buffers and images. I had been doing this by hand for a while,
but got tired of jumping through all those vulkan hoops. While it's
still a little tedious to set up the arrays for QFV_CreateResource (and
they need to be kept around for QFV_DestroyResource), it really eases
calculation of memory object size and sub-resource offsets. And
destroying all the objects is just one call to QFV_DestroyResource.
This is an extremely extensive patch as it hits every cvar, and every
usage of the cvars. Cvars no longer store the value they control,
instead, they use a cexpr value object to reference the value and
specify the value's type (currently, a null type is used for strings).
Non-string cvars are passed through cexpr, allowing expressions in the
cvars' settings. Also, cvars have returned to an enhanced version of the
original (id quake) registration scheme.
As a minor benefit, relevant code having direct access to the
cvar-controlled variables is probably a slight optimization as it
removed a pointer dereference, and the variables can be located for data
locality.
The static cvar descriptors are made private as an additional safety
layer, though there's nothing stopping external modification via
Cvar_FindVar (which is needed for adding listeners).
While not used yet (partly due to working out the design), cvars can
have a validation function.
Registering a cvar allows a primary listener (and its data) to be
specified: it will always be called first when the cvar is modified. The
combination of proper listeners and direct access to the controlled
variable greatly simplifies the more complex cvar interactions as much
less null checking is required, and there's no need for one cvar's
callback to call another's.
nq-x11 is known to work at least well enough for the demos. More testing
will come.
Really, this won't make all that much difference because alias models
with more than one skin are quite rare, and those with animated skin
groups are even rarer. However, for those models that do have more than
one skin, it will allow for reduced allocation overheads, and when
supported (glsl, vulkan, maybe gl), loading all the skins into an array
texture (since all skins are the same size, though external skins may
vary), but that's not implemented yet, this just wraps the old one skin
at a time code.
This makes much more sense as they are intimately tied to the frame
buffer on which a render pass is working. Now, just the window width
and height are stored in vulkan_ctx_t. As a side benefit,
QFV_CreateSwapchain no long references viddef (now just palette and
conview in vulkan_draw.c to go).
While I have trouble imagining it making that much performance
difference going from 4 verts to 3 for a whopping 2 polygons, or even
from 2 triangles to 1 for each poly, using only indices for the vertices
does remove a lot of code, and better yet, some memory and buffer
allocations... always a good thing.
That said, I guess freeing up a GPU thread for something else could make
a difference.
I think I had gotten lucky with captures not being corrupt due to them
being much bigger than all but the L3 cache (and then they're over 1/2
the size), so the memory was being automatically invalidated by other
activity. Don't want to trust such luck, though.
Viewport and FOV updates are now separate so updating one doesn't cause
recalculations of the other. Also, perspective setup is now done
directly from the tangents of the half angles for fov_x and fov_y making
the renderers independent of fov/aspect mode. I imagine things are a bit
of a mess with view size changes, and especially screen size changes
(not supported yet anyway), and vulkan winds up updating its projection
matrices every frame, but everything that's expected to work does
(vulkan errors out for fisheye or warp due to frame buffer creation not
being supported yet).
r_screen isn't really the right place, but it gets the scene rendering
out of the low-level renderers and will make it easier to sort out
later, and hopefully easier to figure out a good design for vulkan.
Regardless of whether the sky is spinning or not, the matrix needs to be
updated with the current origin in order to get the direction vector
right in the shader. Also, it's in the update that the required x-y
plane rotation gets in so the skies move in the correct direction.
This takes care of the global variables to a point (there is still the
global struct shared between the non-vulkan renderers), but it also
takes care of glsl's points-only rendering.
After yesterday's crazy marathon editing all the particles files, and
starting to do another big change to them today, I realized that I
really do need to merge them down. All the actual spawning is now in the
client library (though particle insertion will need to be moved). GLSL
particle rendering is semi-broken in that it now does only points (until
I come up with a way to select between points and quads (probably a
context object, which I need anyway for Vulkan)).
This gets the pipelines loaded (and unloaded on shutdown). Probably the
easy part :P. Still need to sort out the command buffers,
synchronization, and particle generation (and probably a bunch else
that's not coming to mind).
This needed changing Vulkan_CreatePipeline to
Vulkan_CreateGraphicsPipeline for consistency (and parsing the
difference from a plist seemed... not worth thinking about).
It turned out the bindless approach wouldn't work too well for my design
of the sprite objects, but I don't think that's a big issue at this
stage (and it seems bindless is causing problems for brush/alias
rendering via renderdoc and on my versa pro). However, I have figured
out how to make effective use of descriptor sets (finally :P).
The actual normal still needs checking, but the sprites are currently
unlit so not an issue at this stage.
I'm not at all sure what I was thinking when I designed it, but I
certainly designed it wrong (to the point of being fairly useless). It
turns out memory requirements are already aligned in size (so just
multiplying is fine), and what I really wanted was to get the next
offset aligned to the given requirements.
The vertices and frame images are loaded into the one memory object,
with the vertices first followed by the images.
The vertices are 2D xy+uv sets meant to be applied to the model
transform frame, and are pre-computed for the sprite size (this part
does support sprites with varying frame image sizes).
The frame images are loaded into one image with each frame on its own
layer. This will cause some problems if any sprites with varying frame
image sizes are found, but the three sprites in quake are all uniform
size.
This gets the alias pipeline in line with the bsp pipeline, and thus
everything is about as functional as it was before the rework (minus
dealing with large texture sets).
I guess it's not quite bindless as the texture index is a push constant,
but it seems to work well (and I may have fixed some full-bright issues
by accident, though I suspect that's just my imagination, but they do
look good).
This should fix the horrid frame rate dependent behavior of the view
model.
They are also in their own descriptor set so they can be easily shared
between pipelines. This has been verified to work for Draw.
BSP textures are now two-layered with the albedo and emission in the two
layers rather than two separate images. While this does increase memory
usage for the textures themselves (most do not have fullbright pixels),
it cuts down on image and image view handles (and shader resources).
Multiple render passes are needed for supporting shadow mapping, and
this is a huge step towards breaking the Vulkan render free of Quake,
and hopefully will lead the way for breaking the GL renderers free as
well.
When allocating memory for multiple objects that have alignment
requirements, it gets tedious keeping track of the offset and the
alignment. This is a simple function for walking the offset respecting
size and alignment requirements, and doubles as a size calculator.
The stack is arbitrary strings that the validation layer debug callback
prints in reverse order after each message. This makes it easy to work
out what nodes in a pipeline/render pass plist are causing validation
errors. Still have to narrow down the actual line, but the messages seem
to help with that.
Putting qfvPushDebug/qfvPopDebug around other calls to vulkan should
help out a lot, tool.
As a bonus, the stack is printed before debug_breakpoint is called, so
it's immediately visible in gdb.
Modern maps can have many more leafs (eg, ad_tears has 98983 leafs).
Using set_t makes dynamic leaf counts easy to support and the code much
easier to read (though set_is_member and the iterators are a little
slower). The main thing to watch out for is the novis set and the set
returned by Mod_LeafPVS never shrink, and may have excess elements (ie,
indicate that nonexistent leafs are visible).
Quake just looked wrong without the view model. I can't say I like the
way the depth range is hacked, but it was necessary because the view
model needs to be processed along with the rest of the alias models
(didn't feel like adding more command buffers, which I imagine would be
expensive with the pipeline switching).
Since vulkan supports 32-bit indexes, there's no need for the
shenanigans the EGL-based glsl renderer had to go through to render bsp
models (maps often had quite a bit more than 65536 vertices), though the
reduced GPU memory requirements of 16-bit indices does have its
advantages.
Any sun (a directional light) is in the outside node, which due to not
having its own PVS data is visible to all nodes, but that's a tad
excessive. However, any leaf node with sky surfaces will potentially see
any suns, and leaf nodes with no sky surfaces will see the sun only if
they can see a leaf that does have sky surfaces. This can be quite
expensive to calculate (already known to be moderately expensive for
just the camera leaf node (singular!) when checking for in-map lights)
Getting close to understanding (again) how it all works. I only just
barely understood when I got vulkan's renderer running, but I really
need to understand for when I modify things for shadows. The main thing
hurdle was tinst, but that was dealt with in the previous commit, and
now it's just sorting out the mess of elechains and elementss.
Standard quake has just linear, but the modding community added inverse,
inverse-square (raw and offset (1/(r^2+1)), infinite (sun), and
ambient (minlight). Other than the lack of shadows, marcher now looks
really good.
Mostly, this gets the stage flags in with the barrier, but also adds a
couple more barrier templates. It should make for slightly less verbose
code, and one less opportunity for error (mismatched barrier/stages).
This gets the shaders needed for creating shadow maps, and the changes
to the lighting pipeline for binding the shadow maps, but no generation
or reading is done yet. It feels like parts of various systems are
getting a little big for their britches and I need to do an audit of
various things.
vid.aspect is removed (for now) as it was not really the right idea (I
really didn't know what I was doing at the time). Nicely, this *almost*
fixes the fov bug on fresh installs: the view is now properly
upside-down rather than just flipped vertically (ie, it's now rotated
180 degrees).
Loading is broken for multi-file image sets due to the way images are
loaded (this needs some thought for making it effecient), but the
Blender environment map loading works.
They're unlit (fullbright, but that's nothing new for quake), but
working nicely. As a bonus, sort out the sky pass (forced to due to the
way command buffers are used).
There were actually several problems: translucency wasn't using or
depending on the depth buffer, and the depth buffer wasn't marked as
read-only in the g-buffer pass. Getting that correct seems to have given
bigass1 a 0.5% boost (hard to say, could be the usual noise).
That was... easier than expected. A little more tedious that I would
have liked, but my scripting system isn't perfect (I suspect it's best
suited as the output of a code generator), and the C side could do with
a little more automation.
Other than dealing with shader data alignment issues, that went well :).
Nicely, the implementation gets the explicit scaling out of the shader,
and allows for a directional flag.
Still "some" more to go: a pile to do with transforms and temporary
entities, and a nasty one with host_cbuf. There's also all the static
block-alloc lists :/
Light styles and shadows aren't implemented yet.
The map's entities are used to create the lights, and the PVS used to
determine which lights might be visible (ie, the surfaces they light).
That could do with some more improvements (eg, checking if a leaf is
outside a spotlight's cone), but the concept seems to work.
It's not used yet as work needs to be done to better support generic
entities, but this is the next step to real-time lighting (though, to be
honest, I expect it will be too slow to be usable).
Static lights are yet to come (so the screen is black most of the time),
but dynamic lights work very nicely (and look very good) despite the
falloff being incorrect.
While I could reconstruct the position from the screen coords and depth,
this is easier and good enough for now. Reconstruction is an
optimization thing.
Lighting doesn't actually do lights yet, but it's producing pixels.
Translucent seems to be working (2d draw uses it), and compose seems to
be working.
After getting lights even vaguely working for alias models, I realized
that it just wasn't going to be feasible to do nice lighting with
forward rendering. This gets the bulk of the work done for deferred
rendering, but still need to sort out the shaders before any real
testing can be done.
It's not entirely there yet, but the basics are working. Work is still
needed for avoiding duplication of objects (different threads will have
different contexts and thus different tables, so necessary per-thread
duplication should not become a problem) and general access to arbitrary
fields (mostly just parsing the strings)
It's not quite as expected, but that may be due to one of msaa, the 0-15
range in the palette not being all the way to white, the color gradients
being not quite linear (haven't checked yet) or some combination of the
above. However, it's that what should be yellow is more green. At least
the zombies are no longer white and the ogres don't look like they're
wearing skeleton suits.
Doesn't seem to make much difference performance-wise, but speed does
seem to be fill-rate limited due to the 8x msaa. Still, it does mean
fewer bindings to worry about.
This is a big step towards a cleaner api. The struct reference in
model_t really should be a pointer, but bsp submodel(?) loading messed
that up, though that's just a matter of taking more care in the loading
code. It seems sensible to make that a separate step.
I've decided that alias model skins should be in a single four-level
array texture rather than spread over four textures, but there's no way
I want to write that code again: getting it right was hard enough the
first time :P
It's a tad bogus as it's the lights close to the camera, but it should
at least be a good start once things are working. There's currently
something very wrong with the state of things.
The sky texture is loaded with black's alpha set to 0. While this does
hit both layers, the screen is cleared to black so it shouldn't be a
problem (and will allow having a skybox behind the sheets).
Glow map and sky sheet and cube need to wait until I can get some
default textures going, but the world is rendering correctly otherwise
(though a tad dark: need to do a gamma setting).
It now uses the ring buffer code I wrote for qwaq (and forgot about,
oops) to handle the packets themselves, and the logic for allocating and
freeing space from the buffer is a bit simpler and seems to be more
reliable. The automated test is a bit of a joke now, though, but coming
up with good tests for it... However, nq now cycles through the demos
without obvious issue under the same conditions that caused the light
map update code to segfault.
Vulkan validation (quite rightly) doesn't like it when the flush range
goes past the end of the buffer, but also doesn't like it when the flush
range isn't cache-line aligned, so align the size of the buffer, too.
I had originally planned on mixing the stage management with general
texture support code like I did in glsl, but I think that was a mistake
and I did keep looking for scrap.[ch] when I wanted to edit something to
do with the scrap...
It optionally generates mipmaps, and supports the main texture types
(especially for texture packs), including palettes, but is otherwise
rather unsophisticated code. Needs a lot of work, but testing first.
This allows the array in which the command buffers are allocated to be
allocated on the stack using alloca and thus remove the need to
malloc/free of relatively small chunks.
The scrap texture did very good things for the glsl renderer and the
better control over data copying might help it do even better things for
vulkan, especially with lots of little icons.
First pixels! This was a nightmare of little issues that the validation
layers couldn't help with: incorrect input assembly, incorrect vertex
attribute specs. Though the layers did help with getting the queues
working. Still, lots of work to go but this is a major breakthrough as
I now have access to visual debugging for textures and the like.
Short wrappers for Draw functins are in vid_render_vulkan.c so the
vulkan context can be passed on to the actual functions. The 2D shaders
are set up similar to those in glsl, but with full 32-bit color (rgba)
support instead of paletted. However, the textures are not loaded yet,
nor is anything bound.
Dependencies on vkparse.hinc were spreading through the code which I
didn't want as that removes a lot of the automation from the automake
files. This keeps all parser code internal to vkparse.c's scope, and any
accesses required for enum and struct (not yet) definitions can be
fetched by name.
Shaders can be built as spv files and installed into
$libdir/quakeforge/shaders or as spvc files and compiled into the
engine. Loading supports $builtin/name to access builtin shaders,
$shader/path to access external standard shaders and quake filesystem
access for all other paths.