While the old system did get things going, it felt clunky to set up,
especially when it came to variations on render passes (eg, flat vs
cube-mapped). Also, much of it felt inside-out, especially the
separation of pipelines and render passes: having to specify the render
pass and subpass in the pipeline spec made the spec feel overly coupled
to the render pass setup. While this is the case in Vulkan, it is not
reflected properly in the pipeline spec. The new system will adjust the
render pass and subpass parameters of the pipeline spec as needed,
making the pipeline specs more reusable, and hopefully less error prone
as the pipelines are directly referenced by the subpasses that use them.
In addition, subpass dependencies should be much easier to set up as
only the dependent subpass specifies the dependency and the subpass
source dependency is mentioned by name. Frame buffer attachments also
get a similar treatment.
The new spec "format" isn't quite finalized (needs to meet the enemy
known as parsing) but it feels like a good starting place.
There are some missing parts from this commit as these are the fairly
clean changes. Missing is building a separate set of pipelines for the
new render pass (might be able to get away from that), OIT heads texture
is flat rather than an array, view matrices aren't set up, and the
fisheye renderer isn't hooked up to the output pass (code exists but is
messy). However, with the missing parts included, testing shows things
mostly working: the cube map is rendered correctly even though it's not
displayed correctly (incorrect view). This has definitely proven to be a
good test for Vulkan's multiview feature (very nice).
The pic is scaled to fill the specified rect (then clipped to the
screen (effectively)). Done just for the console background for now, but
it will be used for slice-pics as well.
Not implemented for vulkan yet as I'm still thinking about the
descriptor management needed for the instanced rendering.
Making the conback rendering conditional gave an approximately 3% speed
boost to glsl with the GL stub (~12200fps to ~12550fps), for either
conback render method.
While Draw_Glyph does draw only one glyph at a time, it doesn't shape
the text every time, so is a major win for performance (especially
coupled with pre-shaped text).
Font and text handling is very much part of user interface and at least
partially independent of rendering, but does fit it better with GUI than
genera UI (ie, both graphics and text mode), thus libQFgui as well as
libQFui are built in the ui directory.
The existing font related builtins have been moved into the ruamoko
client library.
Thanks to the 3d frame buffer output being separate from the swap chain,
it's possible to have a different frame buffer size from the window
size, allowing for a smaller buffer and thus my laptop can cope (mostly)
with the vulkan renderer.
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.
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.
This splits up render pass creation so that the creation of the various
resources can be tailored to the needs of the actual render pass
sub-system. In addition, it gets window resizing mostly working (just
some problems with incorrect rendering).
This is the minimum maximum count for sampled images, and with layered
shadow maps (with a minimum of 2048 layers supported), that's really way
more than enough.
Things are a bit of a mess with interdependence between sub-module
initialization and render pass initialization, and window resizing is
broken, but the main render pass rendering to an image that is then
post-processed (currently just blitted) is working. This will make it
possible to implement fisheye and water warp (and other effects, of
course).
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.
Now each (high level) render pass can have its own frame buffer. The
current goal is to get the final output render pass to just transfer the
composed output to the swap chain image, potentially with scaling (my
laptop might be able to cope).
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.
Using swizzles in an image view allows the same shader to be used with
different image "types" (eg, color vs coverage).
Of course, this needed to abandon QFV_CreateImageView, but that is
likely for the best.
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).
It turns out my approach to alias skin coloring just doesn't work for
the quake data due to the color curves not having a linear relationship,
especially the bottom colors.
It works on only one layer and one mip, and assumes the provided texture
data is compatible with the image, but does support sub-image updates
(x, y location as parameters, width and height in the texture data).
Another step towards moving all resource creation into the one place.
The motivation for doing the change was getting my test scene to work
with only ambient lights or no lights at all.
This puts the hierarchy (transform) reference, animation, visibility,
renderer, active, and old_origin data in separate components. There are
a few bugs (crashes on grenade explosions in gl/glsl/vulkan, immediately
in sw, reasons known, missing brush models in vulkan).
While quake doesn't really need an ECS, the direction I want to take QF
does, and it does seem to have improved memory bandwidth a little
(uncertain). However, there's a lot more work to go (especially fixing
the above bugs), but this seems to be a good start.
Its value on input is ignored. QFV_CreateResource writes the resource
object's offset relative to the beginning of the shared memory block.
Needed for the Draw overhaul.
I got tired of writing the same 13 or so lines of code over and over (it
actually put me off experimenting with Vulkan). Thus...
QFV_PacketCopyBuffer does the work of handling barriers and a (full
packet) copy from the staging buffer to a GPU buffer.
QFV_PacketCopyImage does a similar job, but for images. However, it
still needs a lot of work, but it does make getting a basic texture onto
the GPU much less of a hassle.
Both functions should make staging data much less error-prone.
This moves the qfv_resobj_t image initialization code from the IQM
loader into the resource management code. This will allow me to reuse
the code for setting up glyph data. As a bonus, it cleans up the IQM
code nicely.
I had missed that vkCmdCopyImage requires the source and destination
images to have exactly the same size, and I guess assumed that the
swapchain images would always be the size they said they were, but this
is not the case for tiled-optimal images. However,
vkCmdCopyImageToBuffer does the right thing regardless of the source
image size.
This fixes the skewed screenshots when the window size is not a multiple
of 8 (for me, might differ for others).
There's a problem with screenshot capture in that the image is sheared
after window resize, but the screen view looks good, and vulkan is happy
with the state changes.
I've found and mostly isolated the parts of the code that will be
affected by window resizing, minus pipelines but they use dynamic
viewport and scissor settings and thus shouldn't be affected so long as
the swapchain format doesn't change (how does that happen?)
This did involve changing some field names and a little bit of cleanup,
but I've got a better handle on what's going on (I think I was in one of
those coding trances where I quickly forget how things work).
This makes bsp traversal even more re-entrant (needed for shadows).
Everything needed for a "pass" is taken from bsp_pass_t (or indirectly
through bspctx_t (though that too might need some revising)).
There are some issues with the light renderers getting mangled, and only
the first light is even touched (just begin and end of render pass), but
this gets a lot of the framework into place.
Sounds odd, but it's part of the problem with calling two different
things with essentially the same name. The "high level" render pass in
question may be a compute pass, or a complex series of (Vulkan) render
passes and so won't create a Vulkan render pass for the "high level"
render pass (I do need to come up with a better name for it).
It now lives in vulkan_renderpass.c and takes most of its parameters
from plist configs (just the name (which is used to find the config),
output spec, and draw function from C). Even the debug colors and names
are taken from the config.
QFV_CreateRenderPass is no longer used, and QFV_CreateFramebuffer hasn't
been used for a long time. The C file is still there for now but is
basically empty.
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.
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).
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)).
