Sadly, anything else makes no sense.
All the recently made changes live or die, depending on this extension's presence.
Without it, there are major performance issues with the buffer uploads. All of the traditional buffer upload methods are without exception horrendously slow, especially in the context of a Doom engine where frequent small updates are required.
It could be solved with a complete restructuring of the engine, of course, but that's hardly worth the effort, considering it's only for legacy hardware whose market share will inevitably shrink considerably over the next years.
And even then, under the best circumstances I'd still get the same performance as the old immediate mode renderer in GZDoom 1.x and still couldn't implement the additions I'd like to make.
So, since I need to keep GZDoom 1.x around anyway for older GL 2.x hardware, it may as well serve for 3.x hardware, too. It's certainly less work than constantly trying to find workarounds for the older hardware's limitations that cost more time than working on future-proofing the engine.
This new, trimmed down 4.x renderer runs on a core profile configuration and uses persistently mapped buffers for nearly everything that is getting transferred to the GPU. (The global uniforms are still being used as such but they'll be phased out after the first beta release.
- we need to check all GL versions when trying to get a context because some drivers only give us the version we request, leaving out newer features that are not exposed via extension.
- added some status info about uniform blocks.
- reactivate alpha testing per fixed function pipeline
- use the 'modern' way to define clip planes (GL_CLIP_DISTANCE). This is far more portable than the old glClipPlane method and a lot more robust than checking this in the fragment shader.
Due to the way the engine works it needs to render a lot of small primitives with frequent state changes.
But due to the performance of buffer uploads it is impossible to upload each primitive's vertices to a buffer separately because buffer uploads nearly always stall the GPU.
On the other hand, in order to reduce the amount of buffer uploads all the necessary state changes would have to be saved in an array until they can finally be used. This method also imposed an unacceptable overhead.
Fortunately, uploading uniform arrays is very fast and doesn't cause GPU stalls, so now the engine puts the vertex data per primitive into a uniform array and uses a static vertex buffer to index the array in the vertex shader.
This method offers the same performance as immediate mode but only uses core profile features.
- Added a segment of code that now makes the intermission wait for all
players before advancing, instead of continuing on any player. A "ready
icon" shows to reflect this.
- The Deathmatch intermisson couldn't show the ready icon (because it
just used the ingame scoreboard), so a proper intermission was added,
which reflects the same design as the coop scoreboard.
- The colour column wasted more space then it should have needed, so it
was replaced with player colour backgrounds.
- Slight y offset adjustments to make everything fit in 320x200
properly.
- Also fixed some very strange thing in the shader's desaturate function. For unknown reasons using the 'mix' function there did not work.
- fixed: The fog boundary special shader could not be used.
Turns out that the name doesn't accurately describe what it does.
It is correct for images that come with their own palette or are true color.
But for images using the game palette it doesn't use the red channel to determine translucency but the palette index! Ugh...
This means it cannot be done with a simple operation in the shader because it won't get a proper source image. The only solution is to create a separate texture.
- remove thing color from lighting calculations.
- implement alpha textures and inverse sprites for infrared as texture modes. This still requires some handling for the alpha texture mode for non-shader rendering because there is no way in the fixed pipeline to do it. The inverted texture effect can be done with a texture combiner.
- fixed: ThingColor for sprites was set in the wrong place. It must be in the Process function, not in the lighting calculation.
- added functions for isolated calculation of sprites' dynlight color.
Namely, acolyte, shadow acolyte, reaver, stalker, and turret. Info on
which states needed the slow flag was obtained with Quasar's permission
by looking at G_InitNew() in g_game.c and the info.c state tables from
Chocolate Strife.
Also added fast flag to acolyte states that needed it, based on the same
source.
- For maps like xtheateriii that expect non-blocking push lines to
activate when you are standing on them and run into a completely different
line, there is now this compatiblity.txt-only flag.
- Added freedoom2.wad as valid alias name (freedoom1.wad already
existed).
- Renamed titles to Freedoom: Phase 1 and Freedoom: Phase 2.
- Reordered to put Phase 1 above Phase 2 in the IWAD picker.
- Fixed: Heretic and Hexen completely skip all normal Z processing on
mobjs with FLOATBOB set. To emulate that, we need to add NOGRAVITY to
everything with that flag set.
Christoph Oelckers
Randy Heit
Braden Obrzut
Edward Richardson
Gaerzi
alexey.lysiuk