This is intended for the built-in 8x8 bitmap characters and quake's
"conchars", but could potentially be used for any simple (non-composed
characters) mono-spaced font. Currently, the buffers can be created,
destroyed, cleared, scrolled vertically in either direction, and
rendered to the screen in a single blast.
One of the reasons for creating the buffer is to make it so scaling can
be supported in the sw renderer.
It's implemented only in the Vulkan renderer, partly because there's a
lot of experimenting going on with it, but the glyphs do get transferred
to the GPU (checked in render doc). No rendering is done yet: still
thinking about whether to do a quick-and-dirty test, or to add HarfBuzz
immediately, and the design surrounding that.
The software renderer uses Bresenham's line slice algorithm as presented
by Michael Abrash in his Graphics Programming Black Book Special Edition
with the serial numbers filed off (as such, more just so *I* can read
the code easily), along with the Chen-Sutherland line clipping
algorithm. The other renderers were more or less trivial in comparison.
The texture animation data is compacted into a small struct for each
texture, resulting in much less data access when animating the texture.
More importantly, no looping over the list of frames. I plan on
migrating this to at least the other hardware renderers.
The models are broken up into N sub-(sub-)models, one for each texture,
but all faces using the same texture are drawn as an instance, making
for both reduced draw calls and reduced index buffer use (and thus,
hopefully, reduced bandwidth). While texture animations are broken, this
does mark a significant milestone towards implementing shadows as it
should now be possible to use multiple threads (with multiple index and
entid buffers) to render the depth buffers for all the lights.
This allows the use of an entity id to index into the entity data and
fetch the transform and colormod data in the vertex shader, thus making
instanced rendering possible. Non-world brush entities are still not
rendered, but the world entity is using both the entity data buffer and
entid buffer.
Sub-models and instance models need an instance data buffer, but this
gets the basics working (and the proof of concept). Using arrays like
this actually simplified a lot of the code, and will make it easy to get
transparency without turbulence (just another queue).
This was one of the biggest reasons I had trouble understanding the bsp
display list code, but it turns out it was for dealing with GLES's
16-bit limit on vertex indices. Since vulkan uses 32-bit indices,
there's no need for the extra layer of indirection. I'm pretty sure it
was that lack of understanding that prevented me from removing it when I
first converted the glsl bsp code to vulkan (ie, that 16-bit indices
were the only reason for elements_t).
It's hard to tell whether the change makes much difference to
performance, though it seems it might (noisy stats even over 50 timedemo
loops) and the better data localization indicate it should at least be
just as good if not better. However, the reason for the change is
simplifying the data structures so I can make bsp rendering thread-safe
in preparation for rendering shadow maps.
For now, at least (I have some ideas to possibly reduce the numbers and
also to avoid the need for actual limits). I've seen gmsp3v2 use over
500 lights at once (it has over 1300), and I spent too long figuring out
that weird light behavior was due to the limit being hit and lights
getting dropped (and even longer figuring out that more weird behavior
was due to the lack of shadows and the world being too bright in the
first place).
Since the staging buffer allocates the command buffers it uses, it
needs to free them when it is freed. I think I was confused by the
validation layers not complaining about unfreed buffers when shutting
down, but that's because destroying the pool (during program shutdown,
when the validation layers would complain) frees all the buffers. Thus,
due to staging buffers being created and destroyed during the level load
process, (rather large) command buffers were piling up like imps in a
Doom level.
In the process, it was necessary to rearrange some of the shutdown code
because vulkan_vid_render_shutdown destroys the shared command pool, but
the pool is required for freeing the command buffers, but there was a
minor mess of long-lived staging buffers being freed afterwards. That
didn't end particularly well.
Brush models looked a little too tricky due to the very different style
of command queue, so that's left for now, but alias, iqm and sprite
entities are now labeled. The labels are made up of the lower 5 hex
digits of the entity address, the position, and colored by the
normalized position vector. Not sure that's the best choice as it does
mean the color changes as the entity moves, and can be quite subtle
between nearby entities, but it still helps identify the entities in the
command buffer.
And, as I suspected, I've got multiple draw calls for the one ogre. Now
to find out why.
The bones aren't animated yet (and I realized I made the mistake of
thinking the bone buffer was per-model when it's really per-instance (I
think this mistake is in the rest of QF, too)), skin rendering is a
mess, need to default vertex attributes that aren't in the model...
Still, it's quite satisfying seeing Mr Fixit on screen again :)
I wound up moving the pipeline spec in with the rest of the pipelines as
the system isn't really ready for separating them.
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).
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).
