The plists can now be accessed by name and the forward render pass
config is available (but not used, or tested beyond syntax). I was going
to have the IQM pipeline spec separate but ran into limitations in the
system (which needs a lot of polish, really).
That @inherit is pretty useful :) This makes it much easier to see how
different pipelines differ or how they are the similar. It also makes it
much clearer which sub-pass they're for.
I was wondering why scaled-down quake-guy was dimmer than full-size
quake-guy. And the per-fragment normalization gives the illusion of
smoothness if you don't look at his legs (and even then...).
I'm not sure what's up with the weird lighting that results from dynamic
lights being directional (sunlight works nicely in marcher, but it has a
unit vector for position).
The parsing of light data from maps is now in the client library, and
basic light management is in scene. Putting the light loading code into
the Vulkan renderer was a mistake I've wanted to correct for a while.
The client code still needs a bit of cleanup, but the basics are working
nicely.
This replaces *_NewMap with *_NewScene and adds SCR_NewScene to handle
loading a new map (for quake) in the renderer, and will eventually be
how any new scene is loaded.
This leaves only the one conditional in the shader code, that being the
distance check. It doesn't seem to make any noticeable difference to
performance, but other than explosion sprites being blue, lighting
quality seems to have improved. However, I really need to get shadows
working: marcher is just silly-bright without them, and light levels
changing as I move around is a bit disconcerting (but reasonable as
those lights' leaf nodes go in and out of visibility).
Id Software had pretty much nothing to do with the vulkan renderer (they
still get credit for code that's heavily based on the original quake
code, of course).
It's not used yet, and thus may have some incorrect settings, but I
decided that I will probably want it at some stage for qwaq. It's
essentially was was in the original spec, but updated for some of the
niceties added to parsing since I removed it back then. It's also in its
own file.
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.
Vulkan doesn't appreciate the empty buffers that result from the model
not having any textures or surfaces that can be rendered (rightfully so,
for such a bare-metal api).
I doubt the calls were ever actually made in a normal map due to the
node actually being a node when breaking out of the loop, but when I
experimented with an empty world model (no nodes, one infinite empty
leaf) I found that visit_leaf was getting called twice instead of once.
Since it is updated every frame, it needs to be as fast as possible for
the cpu code. This seems to make a difference of about 10us (~130 ->
~120) when testing in marcher. Not a huge change, but the timing
calculation was wrapped around the entire base world pass, so there was
a fair bit of overhead from bsp traversal etc.
It makes a significant difference to level load times (approximately
halves them for demo1 and demo2). Nicely, it turns out I had implemented
the rest of the staging buffer code (in particular, flushing) correctly
in that it seems there's no corruption any of the data.
The misinterpretations were due to either the cvar not being accessed
directly by the engine, but via only the callback, or the cvars were
accesssed only by progs (in which case, they should be float). The
remainder are a potential enum (hud gravity) and a "too hard basket"
(rcon password: need to figure out how I want to handle secret strings).
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.
This allows for easy (and safe) printing of cexpr values where the type
supports it. Types that don't support printing would be due to being too
complex or possibly write-only (eg, password strings, when strings are
supported directly).
Surprisingly, only two, but they were caught by the different value
fields being used, thus the cvar was checked in multiple places. I
imagine that's not really all that common, so there may be some
inconsistencies between default value and use.
This allows a single render pass description to be used for both
on-screen and off-screen targets. While Vulkan does allow a VkRenderPass
to be used with any compatible frame buffer, and vkparse caches a
VkRenderPass created from the same description, this allows the same
description to be used for a compatible off-screen target without any
dependence on the swapchain. However, there is a problem in the caching
when it comes to targeting outputs with different formats.
As I had suspected, it's due to a synchronization problem between the
scrap and drawing. There's actually a double problem in that data
uploaded to the scrap isn't flushed until the first frame is rendered
causing a quick init-shutdown sequence to take at least five seconds due
to the staging buffer waiting (and timing out) on a stuck fence.
Rendering just one frame "fixes" the problem (draw was one of the
earliest subsystems to get going in vulkan).
Surprisingly, only two, but they were caught by the different value
fields being used, thus the cvar was checked in multiple places. I
imagine that's not really all that common, so there may be some
inconsistencies between default value and use.
Since it is updated every frame, it needs to be as fast as possible for
the cpu code. This seems to make a difference of about 10us (~130 ->
~120) when testing in marcher. Not a huge change, but the timing
calculation was wrapped around the entire base world pass, so there was
a fair bit of overhead from bsp traversal etc.
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.
While looking at the deferred attachment images with using a template in
mind, I noticed that the opaque attachment was using 8-bit color. The
problem is, it's meant to be HDRI with the compose pass crunching it
down to LDRI. Switching to 16-bit float does seem to have made a subtle
difference (hey, it's still quake data, not much HDRI in there).
That certainly makes it nicer to work with large sets, and shows one way
to be careful with allocated resources: don't allocate them in the
inherited data and use a template that needs a few things filled in to
be valid. Also, it seems that overriding values in sub-structures "just
works" :)
It simply parses the referenced plist dictionary (via @inherit =
plist.path;) into the current data block, then allows the data to be
overwritten by the current plist dictionary. This may be a bit iffy for
any allocated resources, so some care must be taken, but it seems to
work nicely.
This allows a single render pass description to be used for both
on-screen and off-screen targets. While Vulkan does allow a VkRenderPass
to be used with any compatible frame buffer, and vkparse caches a
VkRenderPass created from the same description, this allows the same
description to be used for a compatible off-screen target without any
dependence on the swapchain. However, there is a problem in the caching
when it comes to targeting outputs with different formats.
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).
