I had debated putting the blending in the compose subpass or a separate
pass but went with the separate pass originally, but it turns out that
removing the separate pass gains 1-3% (5-15/545 fps in a timedemo of
demo1).
It's a bit flaky for particles, especially at higher frame rates, but
that's due to supporting only 64 overlapping pixels. A reasonable
solution is probably switching to a priority heap for the "sort" and
upping the limit.
This required making the texture set accessible to the vertex shader
(instead of using a dedicated palette set), which I don't particularly
like, but I don't feel like dealing with the texture code's hard-coded
use of the texture set. QF style particles need something mostly for the
smoke puffs as they expect a texture.
I don't yet know whether they actually work (not rendering yet), but the
system isn't locking up, and shutdown is clean, so at least resources
are handled correctly.
Although it works as intended (tested via hacking), it's not hooked up
as the current frame buffer handling in r_screen is not readily
compatible with how vulkan output is handled. This will need some
thought to get working.
When working, this will handle the output to the swap-chain images and
any final post-processing effects (gamma correction, screen scaling,
etc). However, currently the screen is just black because the image
for getting the main render pass output isn't hooked up yet.
While the HUD and status bar don't cut out a lot of screen (normally),
they might start to make a difference when I get transparency working
properly. The main thing is this is a step towards pulling the 2d
rendering into another render pass so the main deferred pass is
world-only.
There's no API yet as I need to look into the handling of qpic_t before
I can get any of this into the other renderers (or even vulkan, for that
matter).
However, the current design for slice rendering is based on glyphs (ie,
using instances and vertex pulling), with 3 strips of 3 quads, 16 verts,
and 26 indices (2 reset). Hacky testing seems to work, but real tests
need the API.
This cuts down on the memory requirements for skins by 25%, and
simplifies the shader a bit more, too. While at it, I made alias skins
nominally compatible with bsp textures: layer 0 is color, 1 is emissive,
and 2 is the color map (emissive was on 3).
As the RGB curves for many of the color rows are not linearly related,
my idea of scaling the brightest color in the row just didn't work.
Using a masked palette lookup works much better as it allows any curves.
Also, because the palette is uploaded as a grid and the coordinates are
calculated on the CPU, the system is extendable beyond 8-bit palettes.
This isn't quite complete as the top and bottom colors are still in
separate layers but their indices and masks can fit in just one, but
this requires reworking the texture setup (for another commit).
The bright end of the color map is actually twice the palette value, but
I didn't understand this when I came up with the shirt/pants color
scheme for vulkan. However, the skin texture can store only 0..1, so the
mapping to 0..2 needs to be done in the shader. It looks like it works
at least better: the gold key at the end of demo1 doesn't look as bleh,
though I do get some weird colors still on ogres etc.
Line rendering now has its own pipeline (removing the texture issue).
Glyph rendering (for fonts) has been reworked to use instanced quad
rendering, with the geometry (position and texture coords) in a static
buffer (uniform texture buffer), and each instance has a glyph index,
color, and 2d base position.
Multiple fonts can be loaded, but aren't used yet: still just the one
(work needs to be done on the queues to support multiple
textures/fonts).
Quads haven't changed much, but buffer creation and destruction has been
cleaned up to use the resource functions.
Surfaces marked with SURF_DRAWALPHA but not SURF_DRAWTURB are put in a
separate queue for the water shader and run with a turb scale of 0.
Also, entities with colormod alpha < 1 are marked to go in the same
queue as SURF_DRAWALPHA surfaces (ie, no SURF_DRAWTURB unless the
model's texture indicated such).
It is currently an ugly hack for dealing with the separate quad queue,
and the pipeline handling code needs a lot of cleanup, but it works
quite well, though I do plan on moving to HarfBuzz for text shaping. One
nice development is I got updating of descriptor sets working (just need
to ensure the set is no longer in use by the command queue, which the
multiple frames in flight makes easy).
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.
However, this time it doesn't modify the light array when it sorts the
lights by size since the lights are now located before the renderer gets
to see them, and having the fix up the light leafs array would be too
painful (and probably the completely wrong thing to do anyway: the light
array should be treated as constant by the renderer). 1.6GB of memory
for gmsp3v2's lights (a little better than marcher: more smaller lights?).
For reference:
gmsp3v2: shadow maps: 8330 layers in 29 images: 1647706112
marcher: shadow maps: 2440 layers in 11 images: 2358575104
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).
Unfortunately, the animations are pre-baked (by the loader) blocking
run-time determined animations (IK etc). However, this at least gets
everything working so the basics can be verified (the shader posed some
issue resulting in horror movies ;).
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.
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...).
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
This adds the shaders and the pipeline specs. I'm not sure that the
deferred rendering side of the render pass is appropriate, but I thought
I'd give it a go, since quake sprites are really cutoff rather than
translucent.
I'd forgotten (when doing the original brush texture loader) that
turbulent surfaces were unlit and thus always full-bright, then never
wrote the turb shader to take care of it. The best solution seems to be
to just mix the two colors in the shader as it will allow turb surfaces
to be lit in the future (probably with severely limited light counts due
to being a forward renderer).
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.
Smashing everything in the process :P (need to work on the C side).
However, while bindless is supposedly good for performance, the biggest
gain this will bring is portability: the texture counts are
automatically limited to what the hardware can handle, and the reliance
on push descriptors is removed (though they were nice and did help get
things up and running).
My VersaPro doesn't support more than 32 per-stage samplers (lavapipe).
This is a small part of getting Vulkan to run on lavapipe and even in
itself is rather incomplete.
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.
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.
