Rosy

[cloud rivet]

so I don't send it separately

I don't have any vertex buffers

the space limitation is on the push constant

I can stick only so many buffer addresses in 128kb

[wraith urchin]

Yeah the jpgs are annoying because they're gonna be recompressed

[brisk chasm]

you can always split your draws you dont have to force yourself to stuff everything into 1

[dry apex]

just import -> export it in blender

i suppose there would be some addon to do the jpeg->ktx2 transition as well

[brisk chasm]

gltfpack ;p

jaker and i cobbled together some functionality which is in blender's gltf export plugin (4.1+), not blender itself

you go to the gltf export plugin options and set the path to your gltfpack, that enables an option to export to ktx2

you can provide another path there it will put the ktx2 files into that folder, while keeping the originals

its pretty crude

[dry apex]

wow neat

[brisk chasm]

i should probably talk to don mccurdy to have this jank removed again and properly replaced

[wraith urchin]

Honestly though it should be illegal to distribute a texture as a jpg

[brisk chasm]

the big modelling tools should just export ktx2/dds

your raw artist stuff can be whatever you want

ah speaking of that, you can select webp there as well when you export, thats where we should have hooked our shit in, and extend the dropdown list with ktx2, now that i think about that

[wraith urchin]

Unfortunately gpu compression is hardware dependent, so png is kinda the only sensible option

Or exr

[brisk chasm]

ktx2/dds are very portable still

[wraith urchin]

But they use compression no?

[brisk chasm]

maybe have a format or two for mobile fones too

ktx can be compressed

[wraith urchin]

Yeah I thought it was always compressed?

[brisk chasm]

its all in the ktx-software sdk, which could just be part of the tooling

[wraith urchin]

Maybe not

[brisk chasm]

so no excuse not to have that 😛

as a tool like houdini/blender et al

[wraith urchin]

I just use png then the engine creates optimized formats on import

[brisk chasm]

i want that too, im also not happy how i do it in HowToScript atm

im iterating images, then samplers, then textures, then materials, then meshes... but that is somewhat weird, because in order to know what target format for transcoding an image later, i need to know for what material channel that image will be

that means i need to do that in a diffeernt order or do it in 2 passes of sorts

[wraith urchin]

I also create an optimized mesh format, so I don't even look at the gltfs after import

[brisk chasm]

yeah that would be next after getting that material shit right 🙂

[cloud rivet]

vulkan supports a bunch of the ktx/dds compression algorithms as I understand the spec

so that's not an issue for my project

[wraith urchin]

Its optional tho afaik

[cloud rivet]

I want that though

[wraith urchin]

it depends on the hardware

[cloud rivet]

hrm

[wraith urchin]

PCs support BCn

Mobile usually ASTC or whatever

[cloud rivet]

yeah I don't worry about mobile I guess

if amd and nvidia support it :/

based on what others have said about tiling gpus you write engines differently for mobile games anyway? I don't know anything about mobile, and little about anything else

[wraith urchin]

Yeah thats fine I just don't think models should be distributed with compressed textures

[cloud rivet]

oh

I agree

[wraith urchin]

like if its in the game compress the shit out of that

[cloud rivet]

yes give me the full 8k thing

[wraith urchin]

unfortunately polyhaven usually ships the albedo as a jpg

although it is an 8k jpeg

[cloud rivet]

I am going to try and create all of my own visual assets 😅

no off the shelf stuff

idk how animations will go

[wraith urchin]

I usually lanczos those 8k things down to 2k

[cloud rivet]

sound I will have to get from someone I don't have any sound talent

or somewhere

[wraith urchin]

good luck

[cloud rivet]

it will probably not look very good but with time I hope to get better

[wraith urchin]

Honestly I'm trying to use less of my own art but I keep failing at it

and making my own shit

[cloud rivet]

I want to make all that stuff

I want to get good at blender, houdini and marmoset, which is like a cheaper substance painter

[wraith urchin]

I just do everthing in blender

[cloud rivet]

a dedicated materials painter seems really worthwhile

[wraith urchin]

probably

[cloud rivet]

and houdini automates a lot of slick looking geometry for buildings and stuff

[wraith urchin]

I don't like switching between apps if possible though

[cloud rivet]

marmoset would be where I bake

it would be the last link in the asset toolchain before I process the output

it has comprehensive baking config and a python API to hook into it

[wraith urchin]

cool

[cloud rivet]

I haven't used it much

just watched the videos

[wraith urchin]

I finally have a good workflow for baking in blender, but it was a pain to figure it out

[cloud rivet]

I am just getting started with all this and don't know much about it all yet

[wraith urchin]

One of these days I will write an article on baking in blender, for the frog blog

[cloud rivet]

that would be awesome

[true moon]

Just start making shitty stuff in blender

Once you've developed your workflow you can start making it look prettier

But trying to get the pipeline down to make high quality assets from the start will take forever

[wraith urchin]

Yeah figure out how to model first I would say

[cloud rivet]

Yeah it will not look great at first

[slim oak]

don't recommend shit + blender, unless you put on the lid

[wraith urchin]

lid?

[cloud rivet]

What do those words mean?

[slim oak]

not blender as in 3D modelling software, but blender as the thingy you make smoothies in

[wraith urchin]

Ok I get it lol

[inner warren]

add camera then models then see if you fucked up

thats how I did it

[cloud rivet]

or...no camera, no models no chance of fuck up

[inner warren]

the amount I've genuinely seen people follow this thought path is scary

[cloud rivet]

so just adding imgui didn't meaningfully impact frame time

just want to keep tracking as I add things

frame & build time

ok on to loading models

[cloud rivet]

that was kind of easy

I'm going to just draw a triangle from this file and then try and load a gltf parsed with fastgltf and then sponza

[wraith urchin]

Nice, good luck on sponza

also I feel like I'm obligated to tell you the the plural of index is indices

[cloud rivet]

true

I will rename

oh I should gzip

[wraith urchin]

gzip what?

the model?

[cloud rivet]

^^ I am writing my own binary format there with just vertices and normals atm

[wraith urchin]

Are you familiar with lz4?

[cloud rivet]

no

[wraith urchin]

Extremely fast decompression & compression

[cloud rivet]

I will use lz4

[wraith urchin]

I use it for most of my custom formats

[cloud rivet]

thank you

also

Rosy\src on  bt/starting_packager [!?]
❯ git status
On branch bt/starting_packager
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified:   Engine/Graphics.cpp
        modified:   Packager/Asset.h
        modified:   Packager/Main.cpp
        modified:   libs/imgui/imgui.cpp
        modified:   libs/imgui/imgui_draw.cpp
        modified:   libs/imgui/imgui_internal.h
        modified:   libs/imgui/imgui_widgets.cpp
        modified:   libs/imgui/imstb_truetype.h

looks like some of imgui calls it indexes

they call it indices too though

I should create a PR

jk

[wraith urchin]

Oof being inconsistent is worse than being wrong

Although I'm frequently iconsistent on the use of Color vs Colour

but thats mostly a Canadianism we all struggle with

At work you gotta Ctrl + F for both

[cloud rivet]

:<

[brisk chasm]

are you flying an AZERTY kb too @wraith urchin ? 😛 and fr_GB locale? 😛

[slim oak]

Do you compress each file separately or just bundle them together and compress as a package?
I was thinking about bundling all, because I'd have just 1 LZ4 stream per bundle
Also was thinking about compressing my entire virtual texture atlases with LZ4, will see how it works

[brisk chasm]

textures are usually already compressed, no?

[slim oak]

Yeah, but other files like meshes aren't

[brisk chasm]

yeah

so i wouldnt bother compressing textures further, but everything else, why not

[slim oak]

GPT told me BC5/BC7 textures in my VT could be compressed with LZ4 and it would gain me 5-10%
Will see in the future

[brisk chasm]

https://github.com/leblane/TextureTaffy

[wraith urchin]

Azerty isn't used here, not even in French Canada

[wraith urchin]

I do each one individually. And yes I double compress BCn inside LZ4

[slim oak]

Performance wise one LZ4 stream would be better rather than single stream per asset
I'll try bundling mine and check how it goes

[wraith urchin]

Potentially but I load each asset on its own thread, so this would not be ideal

[slim oak]

Yeah, if you keep all textures non-virtualized and concurrent, then yes
I went with VT all the way, now my VT files weigh 2GB/3GB after compression, storing hundreds of 1K/2K/4K PBR textures

[cloud rivet]

What is your game?

[slim oak]

A 3D shooter, currently not wanting to disclose it due to company policy

[wraith urchin]

They don't want you doing side projects?

Honestly that would make me quit

[slim oak]

Nah it's a game we're working on at the company, where I implemented the VT system, I have also 2 other side projects, one being an ERP system

[wraith urchin]

Ah

[bronze socket]

please tell me you mean enterprise resource planning

[slim oak]

Yesss

[cloud rivet]

man all these threads with gameplay, I am real close, I'm really excited to start

[wraith urchin]

Are you gonna have physics?

[cloud rivet]

yes

thinking jolt

I don't know anything at all about physics, I rolled my own ray marching for Blockens

[brisk chasm]

physx5 with new car fisiks

[cloud rivet]

it worked :\

I don't have cars, I was thinking maybe my robot had wheels though

[wraith urchin]

How are your controls gonna work? Do you control the character directly or is it sorta point & click

[brisk chasm]

you want cars in your game jedimasterhandmove

[cloud rivet]

honestly I think I want to get a gamepad

and make the game work with a gamepad

wasd though

[wraith urchin]

The perspective made me think it was point & click

[cloud rivet]

hrm

that's true

point and click

I don't now yet

[wraith urchin]

Like bg3 for example

[brisk chasm]

i loved these (and still do) point and click adventure games (where you also click on commands like open/close/use/speak etc) indiana jones/monkey island/sherlock holmes/zak mckraken ❤️

[wraith urchin]

Ah yes I was making one of those before ASO

[cloud rivet]

I saw that

[wraith urchin]

There was a really short demo I put out but I never finished the thing

[wraith urchin]

Can it have tracks?

I'm basically imagining the robot looking like wall-e

But it's your robot you can do whatever you want

Ooh, what if you could customize the robot?

Like maybe different parts can give you different abilities...

[cloud rivet]

I hadn't considered customizing the robot

I kind of wanted to do a good job with the character's model

not sure yet

I have an idea of a story based game

a big narrative component

[wraith urchin]

Stories are hard

[cloud rivet]

I am full of stories

[wraith urchin]

Are you full of stories or ideas for stories?

[cloud rivet]

well they're all in my head, I have written some down

but I keep developing them in my head

[wraith urchin]

I'm not very good at the details

[cloud rivet]

I have to know both the beginning and the end of the story

before I can work on the details

so once I have an idea I work towards understanding how it ends

and then the details help carry the story from beginning to its end

and bring more meaning to that end

[wraith urchin]

And games have their own little wrinkle of player agency

[cloud rivet]

metrod exodus did that really well

incorporate player agency into a solid story

[wraith urchin]

Yeah I'm mostly just complaining. I find stories one of the harder parts

In order of decreasing frustration for me: story, 3d modelling, gameplay code, engine code, music

[cloud rivet]

you might want to read an issue of the New York Review of Books, maybe canadian libraries have one, I would buy an issue if possible. the online is pay walled

it is very inspiring

it's not just book reviews

they are articles about books and stories

another one is the Paris Review

[wraith urchin]

Yeah Toronto Public Library has a bunch of stuff like that, I'll take a look

[cloud rivet]

I love those two publications, they are just amazing

they also write about music and film

usally in the context of a book review about the topic

I guess I am recommending it because you get to get into the heads of authors who write stories

and you learn about how they think about stories, the reviewers are all writers themselves

[cloud rivet]

I removed all my ALL_COMMANDS full pipeline barriers, and now have a proper sync that doesn't stall the GPU on every layout transition

because I have been reading the sync links every day and am slowly getting it

I think the local reads extension where I can do subpasses with dynamic rendering will also help, I think my frame rate should stay lower than it was in my previous version where I was stopping rendering to write pipeline barriers between CSM and rendering

basically I believe I was using multiple end to end graphics pipeline passes to render each frame unnecessarily

I think my memory masks need tweaking too though, I have left those unchanged from vkguide

[wraith urchin]

Is ALL_COMMANDS basically what GL does?

[cloud rivet]

based on what I read, and this could be , GL optimizes for you based on what it thinks you are doing

which is why I think that GL will probably be more performant than VK for someone who doesn't know what they're doing

[astral hinge]

when you write gl, you produce a render graph for the driver

it can issue granular barriers and reorder passes

[cloud rivet]

the Vulkan Shader Objects proposal goes into a little bit of detail detail on pre-vulkan driver mechanics I found interesting https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/proposals/VK_EXT_shader_object.adoc

so no I don't think what GL does is like ALL_COMMANDS

ALL_COMMANDS is basically worst case behavior

the vulkan sync examples page not to ever use it, and I was only using it because that's what was in vkguide and I was too lazy to update it

but then Matty shamed me

and I have fixed it

[astral hinge]

I use gigabarriers hehe

[cloud rivet]

you use ALL_COMMANDS?

[astral hinge]

I profiled them to not be an issue at all

[cloud rivet]

yeah it was like 1ms for me at best

but

[astral hinge]

  void Context::Barrier() const
  {
    ZoneScoped;
    vkCmdPipelineBarrier2(commandBuffer_, Address(VkDependencyInfo{
      .sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_DEPENDENCY_INFO,
      .memoryBarrierCount = 1,
      .pMemoryBarriers = Address(VkMemoryBarrier2{
        .sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_MEMORY_BARRIER_2,
        .srcStageMask = VK_PIPELINE_STAGE_2_ALL_COMMANDS_BIT,
        .srcAccessMask = VK_ACCESS_2_MEMORY_READ_BIT | VK_ACCESS_2_MEMORY_WRITE_BIT,
        .dstStageMask = VK_PIPELINE_STAGE_2_ALL_COMMANDS_BIT,
        .dstAccessMask = VK_ACCESS_2_MEMORY_READ_BIT | VK_ACCESS_2_MEMORY_WRITE_BIT,
      }),
    }));
  }

[cloud rivet]

it's not hard to avoid them?

[astral hinge]

well being able to safely sync anything with a one-liner is nice

[cloud rivet]

my change is still in a PR but you can see what I did here https://github.com/btipling/Rosy/pull/23/files#diff-6e03010a754993700920e95596272aacef881877804e2098e68071e06c13ab53L1926

[astral hinge]

render graph enjoyers would say it's better to have a zero-liner but meh

[cloud rivet]

basically I make sure my images are in a correct state before fragment shader to be written into

and then after I have a barrier for presentation

and for CSM I'll barrier it in the depth test stage

and that's it? no big deal?

idk

[astral hinge]

a lot of times, especially with compute, there's no hope of having overlap at all, so a gigabarrier is as ideal as it'll get

[cloud rivet]

the sync examples page has common compute scenarios do they not work?

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/wiki/Synchronization-Examples

[astral hinge]

what I'm saying is that if a dispatch B depends on dispatch A, you're absolutely not going to overlap them

[cloud rivet]

right

[astral hinge]

yeah if they are doing unrelated work they could theoretically overlap, but the opportunities for that are comparatively limited

[cloud rivet]

can you barrier B and A so they don't overlap with vkCmdPipelineBarrier(srcStageMask = COMPUTE, dstStageMask = COMPUTE)

?

that's what the yet another sync blog led me to think

[astral hinge]

yes

but the effect is the same as a gigabarrier

[cloud rivet]

hrm

but the ALL_COMMANDS effects all commands

[astral hinge]

I guess my point is that it's easy to focus on making theoretically perfectly granular barriers when in reality is doesn't matter a lot of the time

[cloud rivet]

but with the COMPUTE it doesn't?

so it's not the same I thought

[astral hinge]

hmm I dunno what you mean

are you referring to the source or destination stage mask?

[cloud rivet]

if if you have a queue with commands on it, ALL_COMMANDS flushes the queue of all work

[astral hinge]

the barrier defines two scopes to synchronize

[cloud rivet]

where as with COMPUTE you're only affecting those that care about that stage

hrm

oh

[astral hinge]

I think I see what you mean

[cloud rivet]

I was thinking of when both source and destination are compute

vkCmdDispatch
vkCmdDispatch
vkCmdSetEvent(event, srcStageMask = COMPUTE)
vkCmdDispatch
vkCmdWaitEvent(event, dstStageMask = COMPUTE)
vkCmdDispatch
vkCmdDispatch

as from the yet another sync blog post

I could be wrong, but I believe this doesn't create dependencies for unrelated commands

[astral hinge]

if you draw your frame out on paper with all the passes and their dependencies, I think it'll be more obvious where overlap is and isn't possible

I'm not saying my gigabarriers don't create unnecessary dependencies. I'm saying that the perf difference is probably nil since there was no overlap to be had anyway

[cloud rivet]

yeah the perf was tiny for me too

[astral hinge]

I have profiled my app before which is why I say that

[cloud rivet]

I did too

#1147711082702589973 message

but then that happened

I gotta work on my GP creds

you already have yours

[astral hinge]

was this misinfo

[cloud rivet]

then I can go back and use ALL_COMMANDS

[cloud rivet]

it was wounded pride

[astral hinge]

maybe he was confused. your name isn't even Andy smh

[cloud rivet]

I think he was using alliteration

[echo crystal]

i think it's a reference

to twitch

[cloud rivet]

I was saying vulkan was awesome and easy to understand and then he pointed out I was taking a major shortcut with the hard part of vk

but I had measured it

[astral hinge]

it's a shortcut, but I'd argue it isn't major in most cases

[echo crystal]

render graph when

[bronze socket]

the way I think about it is that the src/dst flags are just fine tuning, if you focus on the fact that you're barriering between commands you'll be more than fine

and yeah events are extra

[astral hinge]

well, if you're writing an epically cpu-driven renderer with lots of passes then it could hurt more

[cloud rivet]

I suspect whenever Matty sees a comment I leave in #vulkan I just assume he closes discord in disgust

[bronze socket]

basically, "cmd A depends on cmd B" -> "A barrier B", then you fine tune based on what actual stages between them are dependent

you don't really need to think about more

[cloud rivet]

yes that's what I have come to understand too but I'm still figuring it out

[true moon]

Martty is mocking you at multiple levels of irony at once to maximize his effort to amusement ratio, all whilst not actually caring that you're doing the thing he's teasing you about

[cloud rivet]

I appreciate that

[astral hinge]

he's maximizing his damage:effort ratio

[astral hinge]

as long as you keep sync val on you'll be alright

[cloud rivet]

I tend to say what I think I know, which I understand may have inaccuracies, because often someone will correct me and I learn from that

[bronze socket]

until the false positives start rolling in and it's not as useful

[cloud rivet]

but on this server saying what you know with inaccuracies is considered here and not seen as benign as in other places

[astral hinge]

I only get false positives for my bindlessisms at least

[cloud rivet]

so I have been trying to be more explicit that I don't know by hedging everything I say with "I am new to this also.." etc

[astral hinge]

yeah I think most people only get annoyed when people are confidently wrong

[echo crystal]

it was bait

[brisk chasm]

always has been

[bronze socket]

btw this might be one reason to try out writing a frame graph, in essence your frame graph's frontend API lets you specify commands' relationships to the resources they touch in the way you'd think about them when preparing the barriers manually, but then you can shovel all that thinking away into some arbitrary backend that unrolls all that information into a flat list of commands, somehow

and that can be as simple or as complex as you like, over time

[cloud rivet]

I like that idea, right now I have a zero abstraction rendering function that explicitly creates all the structs for each phase of the frame

I think as I get to understanding things better and my render function increases in complexity maybe I'll get an idea for how to do that

I have so far regretted every attempt to write any type of abstraction for anything ever when it comes to GPU APIs but I saw an example of the fwog api and I was kind of wow'ed by it

maybe I can eventually get a big brain idea of how abstract things

I don't think I am quite there yet

[steady venture]

Hello, what's this then

Congrats on the new project

[cloud rivet]

thanks! how have you been?

my entire current vulkan code is entirely abstraction free and in an anonymous namespace, no code outside of Graphics.cpp knows I am using vulkan, not even Graphics.h, I would like to keep it that way tbh

[steady venture]

I'm doing fine, although I was away for a little while against my wishes but now I'm back.
I see you've been busy, I'll be sure to keep an eye here 🙂

Don't want to interfere with your discussion here though 👋

[cloud rivet]

you aren't!

excited to see you're back

[cloud rivet]

https://www.khronos.org/spir/visualizer/ is useful

I encountered my first slang bug

I can't give slang function names to the SO create info

they just have to be "main"

even though they're actually "fragmentMain" and "vertexMain"

I actually do see those names in the spirv visualizer though

[31]  OpName %78 "entryPointParam_fragmentMain.color"
[32]  OpName %65 "fragmentMain"

aha

[7]  OpEntryPoint Vertex %2 "main" %22 %58 %62 %15
[8]  OpEntryPoint Fragment %65 "main" %78 %73

look at that bullshit

import data;

[[vk::push_constant]] BasicPushConstant BasicPushConstants;

[shader("vertex")]
BasicVertexStageOutput vertexMain(uint uiVertexId: SV_VertexID)
{
    BasicInputVertex v = *(BasicPushConstants.v + uiVertexId);
    float4 posWorld = float4(v.position, 1.0);

    BasicVertexStageOutput output;

    output.basicVertex.normal = v.normal;

    output.sv_position = float4(v.position, 1.f);

    return output;
}

[shader("fragment")]
Fragment fragmentMain(BasicVertex basicVertex: BasicVertex) : SV_Target
{
    Fragment output;
    output.color = float4(basicVertex.normal, 1.0);
    return output;
}

Where is there a "main" in this

@inner warren pls fix slang ^^ it needs another PR

[cloud rivet]

we are so back

this is using my custom binary format, actual no full pipeline barrier sync, zero abstraction init and zero abstraction rendering

the rendering and & asset stuff near doubled my build time from 2 seconds to nearly 3.5

3,006 loc triangle

[cloud rivet]

still slang, still bda, still bindless, still dynamic rendering, still shader objects, no gigabuffers

anyway

I gotta work on gltf

I got a 4 day weekend maybe I get done by monday evening

[inner warren]

-fvk_use_names or smth like that

-fvk-use-entrypoint-name

[cloud rivet]

❯ Write-Host $env:VULKAN_SDK
C:\VulkanSDK\1.4.304.0

updated to latest, everything just works, love it

still on 1.3 since I don't want to use a beta driver

ok gltf'ing time

first I'm going to just gltf export the demo cube with a color

then I'm going to make deccer cubes again

then crytek sponza

then intel sponza

then game play

I got exactly 2 weeks before I have to start gameplay I think I can do it, I got 3.5 days of no work left so maybe I can get all the way to deccer by end of weekend

[brisk chasm]

lt se ga au = lets go 🙂

[astral hinge]

I could tell 😄

[brisk chasm]

thought you might needed a minute because you didnt updoot those

[astral hinge]

there 😄

[inner warren]

I dont know why -fvk-use-entrypoint-names isn't the default behavior, probably for the glsl codegen

[cloud rivet]

it's fine I'll just "main"

[cloud rivet]

once I statically linked fastgltf the full build jumped from 3 seconds to 12, but that's just if I clean it and fastgltf isn't going to update often.

that's the first time I statically linked a C++ library, I had previously dynamically linked via vcpkg but I don't like vcpkg

it does make my build really painful for anyone else because there's a lot of manual git clone and building you have to do build the project right now, but I am documenting it all in my README but I doubt anyone but me will build it anyway and really the instructions are just for me to build it on my laptop or if I have to idk get a new computer or something

I should add a cmake file just for pulling in third party deps so it doesn't have to be so manual at some point

I should use how fastgltf pulls in simdjson as an example I guess

I'm not going to worry about it until I need to I guess

I wish vcpkg wasn't terrible

[wraith urchin]

why not use a submodule?

[cloud rivet]

Oh because I hadn’t thought of that, thanks!

[wraith urchin]

No worries

[light salmon]

oh yea where did u get/how did u make the skybox texture?

[cloud rivet]

I found it on sketchfab, I don't use it anymore after I figured out it was AI generated 😅

well

I did some work in blender to make it work for me

I got my demo cube gltf import working, but I need a camera to see it properly

all I can see right now is

It's 2:33 am I think I will do it tomorrow, I will have to upload a scene buffer with all the matrices and directional light etc

this binary format stuff is so clean though

I haven't applied compression yet I still need to do that

I will before sponza I guess

my binary format extension is .rsy

renderdoc does not support any KHR maintenance extensions https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc/blob/v1.x/renderdoc/driver/vulkan/extension_support.md

I need to conditionally import them to support renderdoc I guess fml

or just not use them

I think not worth using them tbh

[light salmon]

I bet if I do some tweaking in my own rendering thing I could create something similar and better for the skybox in the thumbnail

[brisk chasm]

you can dynamically link any of your libs too

i believe a set(BUILD_SHARED ... at fastgltf conf time should do too

[brisk chasm]

read "heresy" 😄

the h is silent

[cloud rivet]

Fastgltf’s cmake’s VS project doesn”t produce a dll by default fwiw and anyway not important to me all that much but that probably is an alternative

I don’t think that dynamically linking it is common

[brisk chasm]

https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/BUILD_SHARED_LIBS.html

since fastgltf is not explicitly stating SHARED or STATIC, this BUILD_SHARED_LIBS thing could do the trick

[cloud rivet]

My engine doesn’t need fastgltf, my asset packager does, I added an import method to my Asset.cpp file which does the loading via fastgltf, My engine uses Asset.cpp to load the asset from disk. Instead of doing all this I will pull the gltf loading out of Asset.cpp and create a new Gltf.cpp and give it an Asset and now Engine will build in 3 seconds again

[wraith urchin]

is the "asset packager" an external tool?

[brisk chasm]

ah yeah, if its just some external tool then whatever (link fastgltf as header only)

[wraith urchin]

Are you gonna have a separate editor?

[cloud rivet]

It’s a separate vs project inside Rosy that builds a console application that converts gltf files to my tsy format

[wraith urchin]

I like to be able to just drag a gltf into the editor and have it pop up

[cloud rivet]

I like having separate tools like @slender ember I am inspired by that approach

What kind of editor do you mean?

[wraith urchin]

Like how do you make "levels"?

[cloud rivet]

Oh

Does blender not work for that?

[wraith urchin]

It can

but you will probably need to write some plugins

[cloud rivet]

I was hoping I could just use a single gltf

I don’t mind writing plugins

[wraith urchin]

You will have to extend gltf too

because you will want more than just geometry data in your level

gltf is designed to be extended

[cloud rivet]

Nice

Yeah maybe I can export ECS components and tags from gltf extensions

[wraith urchin]

Also your plugins will probably break during the next blender update though 💀

As long as you are ok with maintaining them, or keeping an old version of blender (like @silver slate does iirc)

AniCator does editing in blender, he might have some good advice for you

[silver slate]

https://tenor.com/view/hello-chat-rayman-hi-chat-morning-chat-ubisoft-gif-26952517

[cloud rivet]

Hi

[wraith urchin]

How does your blender editing setup work?

[silver slate]

I've got a bunch of custom properties set up for objects to configure them. My scenes use old school entities, no ECS. I define the types in a document that is loaded by my addon, it creates all the properties for every entity type and that is set up on objects based on their set type.

[cloud rivet]

I was inspired by AniCator to do the custom format and use imhex also so I need to set up imhex to be able to parse my format like you have it

[wraith urchin]

Yeah if you're gonna be doing custom blender scripts maybe skip glTF altogether

[cloud rivet]

Makes sense

[cloud rivet]

Wow

[silver slate]

It uses some dark magic to swap out the properties.

The addon serves as a batch exporter of model files and scene data.

[cloud rivet]

Amazing stuff

[silver slate]

{
    "name": "CityCube.038",
    "uuid": "b5504f0e-32e4-4cf4-ae2b-52a22e22e041",
    "type": "mesh",
    "mesh": "cube",
    "shader": "DefaultTextured",
    "texture": "bigarchsurface",
    "position": "-41.124340 -400.000000 22.457418",
    "rotation": "-0.000000 0.000000 0.000000",
    "scale": "45.475323 0.480214 4.567022",
    "color": "1.000000 1.000000 1.000000",
    "visible": "1",
    "collision": "1",
    "collisiontype": "aabb",
    "static": "1",
    "stationary": "0",
    "damping": "1.0",
    "friction": "0.5",
    "restitution": "1.0",
    "drag": "1.0"
},
{
    "name": "TriggerPortDistrict",
    "uuid": "25813374-e0de-4441-b584-13f4d407b431",
    "type": "trigger_box",
    "position": "-50.030743 -127.692970 27.359901",
    "rotation": "-0.000000 0.000000 0.000000",
    "scale": "109.927025 135.856430 30.226276",
    "frequency": "0",
    "filter": "player",
    "bounds": "-109.927025 -135.856430 -30.226276,109.927025 135.856430 30.226276"
},
{
    "name": "Stands.001",
    "uuid": "3b953355-e1aa-46dd-957f-f1238748a5ea",
    "type": "mesh",
    "mesh": "stands",
    "material": "plaster_trim2",
    "position": "65.000000 38.000000 8.000000",
    "rotation": "-0.000000 0.000000 0.000000",
    "scale": "1.000000 1.000000 1.000000",
    "color": "1.000000 1.000000 1.000000",
    "visible": "1",
    "collision": "1",
    "collisiontype": "aabb",
    "static": "1",
    "stationary": "0",
    "damping": "1.0",
    "friction": "0.5",
    "restitution": "1.0",
    "drag": "1.0"
},``` here's some of the output of the scene/level side

[slender ember]

This has definitely been the case for me, but not sure it's necessarily more work than maintaining a custom editor.

My main reason for having an editor is to have the same renderer as the game, making it more of a WYSIWYG kinda deal

[wraith urchin]

My editor is part of the game executable, thats actually my preferred way of doing it, but there are certainly tradeoffs with any method

[silver slate]

I haven't had my addons break on me yet, just haven't switched to Blender 4.1 and up yet for other reasons. (quadratic loading time bug)

[slender ember]

Yeah, mine as well. The editor app just wraps the game and starts it in a special editor mode.

[wraith urchin]

Like basically you pause the game and edit in situ

[slender ember]

Ah, I see. I keep the editor flow separate from the game flow. But yeah there are benefits to doing that.

[silver slate]

Yeah, I have inspection tools available in-game, although no editor. Of course you know this, but just saying it here for the others. :p

[cloud rivet]

I love how seamless that experience always is when you switch from game to editing in your videos

[slender ember]

Another cool thing I can do is make a component in the game code and have it run custom logic in the editor.

Eg. my grass system, along with the editor for painting it, is completely game-side code.

Kinda like how you can make scripts that run in the editor, in Unity.

[cloud rivet]

I saw all those grass markers and icons you have in the level viewer it’s really cool

[slender ember]

Ah 🙂 Those things are there just so that you can select the object in the scene, rather than having to go through the hierarchy.

[silver slate]

I did something like this with the Source engine once, as it was more straightforward than modifying the external editor.

[slender ember]

Since it would be annoying if the editor selected the grass if the user clicked anywhere on the ground.

[slender ember]

Indeed. I have an editor which opens the levels of several games actually, and it's really handy to be able to have custom data editors in the game code for each one. The editor app binary is the same for both games.

[wraith urchin]

I have this exact problem lol, if you wanna edit the terrain, you have to manually search for the terrain entity

[slender ember]

The icons Bjorn mentioned are just a component with a material on them. They vaporize during the export, of course.

Generally I use them on object types that are "invisible" but still have a transform. That also allows me to move things around by dragging the icon around. Eg. triggers.

Then I have an "extended selection mode" which you use by holding down Alt. It allows you to select things that would normally be ignored. Eg. you can just click the ground to select the terrain, or select locked objects if no other unlocked objects were hit by the raycast etc...

[cloud rivet]

I like how the line around an area on the ground animates a fade in and out effect

Like all of the everything in that

[slender ember]

It's just a sine wave.

[cloud rivet]

Ah makes sense

It a nice touch

[slender ember]

Well, it's a game side thing so it's supposed to be flashy

I just havent bothered to "stop the time" that's fed to the shaders in the editor.

Which also means that my wind animation keeps running when the game is paused, been bugging me for a long time...

[wraith urchin]

@cloud rivet https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/clang-support-msbuild?view=msvc-170

[cloud rivet]

I can’t wait until I have wind animation bugs.

Hrm space station vents

New level idea

[slender ember]

It's just a shader 🙂 You can have it today.

Feed the time to your shader, offset your vertices in the VS by a mix of overlaid sin/cos waves or sample some noise. Bob's your uncle.

[cloud rivet]

Nice!

Thank you

Also my game idea just changed

Based on this conversation

So still an obsolete robot escape room game

But as you escape from one level to another you slowly gain more control over the space station and its automated systems

Which you then use to solve the next puzzles

And also changes the narrative of the story

And there’s like an economy of resources you have to manage to control the station that progresses in complexity as you gain more access

But you’re just trying to escape

But your decisions impact others who aren’t after you who live on the station too

[slender ember]

I dunno how you got from VS sine waves to space stations, but whatever floats your boat 😄

[cloud rivet]

Wind animations

Steam vents, obstacles

I have been thinking in my head about the puzzles

Idk how it connected either

Space station was just a preexisting idea

Because no wind on a station

But I could add vents

Which could be hot or push or something

[slender ember]

Well, be the first game with windy spacestations, I duuno....

[cloud rivet]

HVAC on a massive pace station that keeps thousands of non-robot inhabitants alive is an interesting concept to think about

I just figured out so much

I gotta write all this down when I get home

So you can basically sacrifice the lives of others to save your self but you will be warned and you will start to see the consequences and it will make later problems worse/different

A good 2D UI is going to be critical

Point and click movement

If you get near something you can control it will appear on screen hud

[wraith urchin]

Going with the point + click? gonna need some pathfinding then

[cloud rivet]

Yeah

[wraith urchin]

Allow me to shill recast/detour

[slender ember]

Is there any other option? 😄

Other than rolling your own of course

[wraith urchin]

vblanco has entered the chat

[slender ember]

Oh boy, what did I do? 😱

[wraith urchin]

lol, hes got a whole recast rant

[slender ember]

Oh, I have recast rants to spare.

But at the same time, it's saved me so much time.

[wraith urchin]

same

[slender ember]

In fact I also use NanoVG. I feel like I should buy Mikko Mononen a beer at least.

[cloud rivet]

I gotta look into these thanks

So controllable systems, garbage systems, hvac, lights, alarm systems….

Ramps and doors

Being able to open a door will be the intro puzzle that introduces you to the system

[slim oak]

Your game idea has some LEGO Junkbot vibes 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYOlQcOTji4

[cloud rivet]

Hrmm yeah

There’s this line of dialogue in The Professional where Leon explains that distance is a measure of skill, as you become more proficient in his craft you can close the distance to your target

That’s kinda how I will use camera distance

This game has a big distance

next game maybe I an get a little bit closer

Hopefully I will have improved my model and animation and render skills as well as my engine

I don’t think I will need any blending for geometry

Camera moves 2 dimensions in gameplay

Just a lot problems I won’t have

It’s a 3D game though

alright done walking rosy time for work

[cloud rivet]

today's soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUNmn3nFVCU

[cloud rivet]

I quarantined fastgltf to the Packager project and now the Engine build time is back down to ~3s, was 12s

[cloud rivet]

my camera I think I will go with:

struct camera
{
    double g; // projection plane distance
    double s; // aspect ratio
    double n; // near plane
    double f; // far plane
    double fov; // field of view
    std::array<float, 16> p; // projection
    std::array<float, 16> v; // view
    std::array<float, 16> vp; // view projection
    std::array<float, 16> r; // camera orientation
    result process_sdl_event(SDL_Event event);
};

I will internally in cpp use glm, but between TUs it will just be arrays

the rendering engine will not know I use glm

it will not do any math

on the bits talking to vk on the cpu side anyway

[astral hinge]

using arrays instead of proper math types is kinda gross

[cloud rivet]

it's not math here

it's just data transfer

it just bytes

[astral hinge]

you'll have to convert it to another type to do anything with it though

the point of types is to be that view

otherwise everything would just be void*

[cloud rivet]

it's still typed to be an array of numbers

it's not void*

[astral hinge]

yeah it's more typed than void* but less typed than it could be

I'd assume you're doing this for compile perf reasons but using an stl type for that would be counterproductive

[cloud rivet]

in my bikeshed I don't want things that don't need to know about math to not know about it and to those things that can do math to convert data that can be mathed to their math types I guess

[astral hinge]

I don't really get it but I won't stop you

[cloud rivet]

I guess it's just a reminder to myself to not do math stuff where it doesn't belong

like hopefully the temptation to avoid doing quick fixes with some * -0.5 on some glm vec3 prior to putting things in a buffer/push constant at the last moment is averted ? idk, I feel like my math has been all over the place

idk maybe it is bad and I will change it

[brisk chasm]

please write things out

g s n et al

using longer variable names wont increase compile times : )

[astral hinge]

So I guess I understand everything but the rationale for this

What is the renderer doing if not math? Is this just a loophole in your "no graphics api abstraction" rule?

If you feel compelled to put a hack somewhere it'll be a hack regardless of where it is

Anyways I'll stop

[true moon]

Trying to separate things so strongly is basically a form of abstraction itself tbh

When I say I use no abstraction what I mean is the renderer is basically just game code

I just happen to have a barrier in between them for organizational reasons

But that barrier is literally just a render(scene) function call that passes the game state to the renderer

If you try to write the renderer to be completely ignorant of the game, you're going to end up doing extra work on the game side to interface with it

[astral hinge]

But then it'll work for any game

Nocode is compatible with all software!

[true moon]

You have game code, and you have API calls, and somewhere in between there you need code that implements the game graphics using the API calls

If you try to make the renderer not do any of that work, you're going to have to do it outside of the renderer

And unless you just put GL calls in game systems, that means you're creating abstractions that are basically just unnecessary work

Vk calls in this case

[cloud rivet]

this and all this other stuff is all Lengyel influence lol

there's no rendering math in his C4 renderer either, there's some allocation math

he doesn't use glm at all

[true moon]

Who calculates the view matrix

[cloud rivet]

the camera

that's what vkguide does too

and my other book also does that

essential game math

[true moon]

That's still basically putting renderer logic into the game, which is something that can be avoided

[cloud rivet]

yes I think constructing the view frustum is rendering

that's why I think I qualified after with vk bits, I think more I am keeping it out of the RHI, even though I don't call it RHI anymore

the whole thing is still a rendering engine and the camera is part of it

I think what would be Ok at that layer though is the NDC conversion

since it's Y down in vk

[brisk chasm]

the only game information about camera is position and its orientation plus fov if its used for perspectiveisms

[cloud rivet]

the camera is used for so much

[brisk chasm]

and perhaps for after effects certain lense attributes for dof/and thingy, i forgot the name, that eye adaptation thing

[cloud rivet]

the frustum defines the viewable area, it's used for culling, it's used for knowing where to position the CSM camera, it's used for a lot more than just fov and perspective and position

it's a vital piece of information for lots of things

[brisk chasm]

the renderer can calculate the frustum out of perspective and view matricles

[cloud rivet]

the viewable area is basically where the game is taking place

[true moon]

All of these things you're describing seem like renderer tasks

[brisk chasm]

the camera could carry csm attroibutes for how many splits you want and at what offset, although those are most likely renderer settings

[cloud rivet]

right and the camera is part of the rendering engine

[true moon]

ok I see so there is a second layer of separation between the API and the renderer?

[cloud rivet]

right

[brisk chasm]

the camera in openspace will just be a shrimple component with 1 fov attribute

[true moon]

auto& materials = m_materials[static_cast<uint16_t>(materialSet)];

// 1. Near pass (cockpit view)
if (cockpitView)
{
    BEGIN_LABEL(intlMark);
    begin_pass(frame, Pass::InteriorOpaque, nullptr);
    proj = m_game.computeProj(camObj, 0.05f, 50.0f);

    BEGIN_LABEL(opqMark);
    VTechnique& mat = m_materials[(int)TargetExtent::Native][(int)MaterialSteps::OpaqueInternal];
    bind_opaque(frame, proj, viewIndex, mat);
    // Draw
    for (auto const& tgt : cockpitOpaque)
    {
        draw_opaque(frame, tgt.entity, tgt.index, mat);
    }
    END_LABEL();
    BEGIN_LABEL(transpMark);
    for (auto const& tgt : cockpitTransparent)
    {
        draw_HUD_glass(frame, proj, tgt.entity, viewIndex, tgt.index, MaterialSteps::HUDPrepass);
    }
    END_LABEL();

    end_pass(cmd);
    END_LABEL();
}

if (cockpitView)
{
    // 2. Distant opaque (continue after internal view)
    BEGIN_LABEL(farMark);
    begin_pass(frame, Pass::FarPass, targetFB);
}
else
{
    // 2. Distant opaque (clear all attachments if there was no internal draw)
    BEGIN_LABEL(farMark);
    begin_pass(frame, Pass::FarPassClear, targetFB);
}
proj = m_game.computeProj(camObj, 500.0f, 1.425e5f);

BEGIN_LABEL(opqMark);
VTechnique& opqMat = materials[(int)MaterialSteps::OpaqueExternal];
bind_opaque(frame, proj, viewIndex, opqMat);

for (auto const& tgt : farOpaque)
{
    draw_opaque(frame, tgt.entity, tgt.index, opqMat);
}
END_LABEL();
BEGIN_LABEL(terrainMark);
viewProj = proj * view;
draw_terrain(frame, terrain, viewProj, eyePos, false, materialSet, farTerrainChunks);
END_LABEL();
glm::mat4 orientProj = proj * viewOrient;
VTechnique& skyMat = materials[(int)MaterialSteps::Sky];
draw_sky(frame, sky, skyMat, orientProj);

flightsimposting

[cloud rivet]

oh I like your macros for labels

I should do that

[true moon]

Example of one of those steps

void Renderer::draw_sky(FrameData& frame, Entity sky, VTechnique& mat, glm::mat4 viewOrientProj)
{
    auto& comps = m_game.comps;
    VkCommandBuffer cmd = frame.resources->m_commandBuffer;

    vkCmdBindPipeline(cmd, VK_PIPELINE_BIND_POINT_GRAPHICS, mat.pipeline);

    auto& obj = comps.renderables[sky];
    auto* mesh = get_mesh(obj.meshName);

    // Push constants
    struct
    {
        glm::mat4 mvp;
    } constants;
    constants.mvp = viewOrientProj;
    vkCmdPushConstants(cmd, mat.pipelineLayout,
        VK_SHADER_STAGE_VERTEX_BIT, 0, sizeof(glm::mat4), &constants);

    // Bind VBO/EBO
    VkDeviceSize vertOffset = 0;
    vkCmdBindVertexBuffers(cmd, 0, 1, &mesh->m_vertexBuffer.m_buffer, &vertOffset);

    // Draw object
    vkCmdDraw(cmd, mesh->m_vertices.size(), 1, 0, 0);
}

[cloud rivet]

cool stuff

[true moon]

This is what I describe as low-abstraction in my projects since the renderer is basically just game code that does raw API calls

so something like calculating view matrices would just be thrown into that bucket too

At the start of the render() function there's a step that builds up std::vectors of data associated with the draw commands

Moreso for drawing opaque objects since they need to draw on ssbos of transform data etc. unlike this sky pass

[inner warren]

😎

And then you have maths

and then you have helper functions to call the maths functions for you

[brisk chasm]

why is cameraTransform a special type

[inner warren]

bad decisions made early on

[cloud rivet]

this camera stuff is taking a bit of work to put together

[cloud rivet]

camera done ✅

[cloud rivet]

about same frame time

[cloud rivet]

four second builds now, long ways away from 79 seconds though

[cloud rivet]

3743 loc now

my frame time before was like 3-4ms, I think CSM was like 1ms of that

my frames are like 10x faster atm then what they were before

I don't think deccer cubes are going drop me down by 10x but will see

I just need to pull materials out of the demo cube and then I can move to deccer cubes, which involve adding texture/sampler support back into the engine, and then I can do cryotek sponza

I am really over generative ai in a big way, and have cancelled all my ai plans, except coderabbit, it does have problems, but they did a really good job with it, I like this diagram it gave me

I think adopting VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read means I can't use renderdoc anymore

hrm

I think I may have to use it anyway to get subpasses with dynamic rendering

renderdoc documentation says they don't support any KHR extensions

that would be a massive workaround to support just renderdoc, even worse than what I had to do to get bindless & support renderdoc

[cloud rivet]

just been working on my powershell scripts that watch for slang shader changes and rebuild them

working mostly nicely although I don't know much about .NET stuff

[cloud rivet]

got color and directional lighting in though

ok will really need to start on materials now

my shader compiler is doing great though

it runs in the background and just builds everything whenever I edit the files

[cloud rivet]

that was so much work

it's not even correct yet, I just hard code the first mesh and surface in the renderer right now, I am getting it all out though

I'm going to do deccer cubes tomorrow, then I will have to fix all that

and that will probably take a couple of days maybe because of the textures

and all the scene graph stuff

[steady venture]

How shit is VS2022 compared to 2019 in your opinion? I'm contemplating switching

<unknown> shit is starting to piss me off. Intellisense is hooked to a rand % 2 or something I swear

[true moon]

It's less shit than it used to be but still has a few annoyances

But you'll get used to it, it's not that different

[steady venture]

I should at least try and see for myself then 👍

[silver slate]

Suddenly, VS hate outta nowhere 👀

[true moon]

I like vs2019 a lot that's what I still use at home

[silver slate]

I use VS 2022 but my project is on the old 2015 compiler.

[slim oak]

VS 2022 + C# + AOT = 60GB RAM eaten up

[cloud rivet]

It’s mostly good but sometimes it decides something is a warning that it didn’t used to and used to build fine. Sometimes iI just have to restart it because it thinks everything is suddenly an error.

I have warnings configured as build errors

I didn’t use vs2019 much

I mostly like it. It’s much better than visual studio code

[brisk chasm]

the worst ones were 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2013

[cloud rivet]

I was using vim during those years

[brisk chasm]

although c++ compiled almost as quick in 2008 as in vc6

(i added ntlm auth into TortoiseSVN back when, which also borked my whole c# dev environment then, had to have it renewed, was a company pc :D)

[slender ember]

What, 2012 was infinitely worse than 2013 😄

THAT WAS THE ONE THAT SCREAMED AT YOU IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME OHMYGAWD

[brisk chasm]

right i wanst sure if it was called 2012 hehe but internal version was 11 iirc hehe

[slender ember]

Yeah vc11 was 2012

[brisk chasm]

that was indeed a horrible version as well

[slender ember]

2013 was released just one year after and was actually quite decent, but wasn't supported by any Xbox XDKs, so no-one at our studio used it, except me who had to hack some msbuild files to get our stuff to compile 😄

[brisk chasm]

: )

was it 2013 already or 2015 where they gave you an option of how you wanted your FILE MENU IN CAPS OR STANDARD AS USUAL

it felt like it took them ages

[slender ember]

It was 2013. It was ALL CAPS OHMYGAWD by default, but they allowed you to toggle it off

[brisk chasm]

might have been just a SP in between

hihi

good times

[slender ember]

I started my engine on 2008 and it's been through almost every single version since then except 2017, and now sits on 2019.

2022 is actually a bit faster in my experience than 2019 with really big projects.

[brisk chasm]

i was just about to say

[slender ember]

Probably because they finally ported it to x64

[brisk chasm]

vs2022 feels faster

ja

the whole addon system became a lot easier too

[silver slate]

I remember the days before dark themes.

I think 2010 was the last one without a dark theme.

[slender ember]

Yep, so it was.

[cloud rivet]

I increased my max swap chain images from 2 to 3 (and had to fix some bugs) no effect on performance when you're drawing a cube of course and just 52 events per frame

also

[brisk chasm]

its time you throw nanite 3.0 and vsm 2.0 at it

[cloud rivet]

most of my frame is just the individual commands that you configure on a pipeline renderpass

that big white bar

it's just configuring the pipeline one item at a time

I can't actually see how long it takes the ms is blank

[brisk chasm]

btw, it sounded like you like ambient music too - there was some playing in your earlier recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpAK3fosNIE

[brisk chasm]

because all those things literally take no time i would imagine

[cloud rivet]

this is exactly the stuff I listen to while coding

[brisk chasm]

haha 🙂

nice

[cloud rivet]

yeah I guess graphical representation on screen does not represent time spent on a timeline view

[brisk chasm]

tons of ai-sloppified channels are coming out of nowhere for some reason, but they have some nice ambientisms going

[brisk chasm]

gpu didnt even blink

[cloud rivet]

I just assume it's ai generated music at this point idk

[brisk chasm]

thats why measuring frametimes and performance when you render absolutely 0 is meaningless

[brisk chasm]

very likely

[cloud rivet]

so 0 gpu time

[brisk chasm]

fastest renderer on the planet hehe

[cloud rivet]

yeah so recording those pipeline cmds takes zero time

@astral hinge that thing I said about SO cmd recording taking a long time was previously because I didn't know how to use nsight 😅 it's all just fence time and resetting the command buffer wait time

man resetting the command buffer takes longer than waiting for a fence hrm, command buffers aren't cheap I guess

nsight is great

my favorite thing about it is just works with the extensions I already request

I do appreciate all the hard work people are putting into renderdoc for a thing I dont' have to pay anything for, so I am not complaining

let me put in the ALL_COMMANDS and see if that explains my frame time being 300 microseconds instead 3ms

I don't know why my frametime is so much shorter now

I must have been doing something really dumb before

10 extra microsecond difference between ALL_COMMANDS and actually using proper stages

I guess I am just not drawing/dispatching enough for any of this to make a difference

alright, time to build a scene graph and load them deccer cubes

I think I was just doing something really dumb in my previous engine

[brisk chasm]

deth added an animated version an hour ago or so 🙂

[cloud rivet]

oh

[cloud rivet]

ooh with a point light

very nice

oh

[brisk chasm]

that might have beena left over from my dinglefartaroundisms

[cloud rivet]

this is in blender

he just animated it in blender

ohh

[brisk chasm]

yep

[cloud rivet]

as in

for me to use

to check my animation

[brisk chasm]

hehe

[cloud rivet]

!

this is great

[brisk chasm]

and potentially for StarFoxe3

[cloud rivet]

I guess I have learned that at this point performance checks are mostly a did I massively mess something up somewhere check, because there's basically nothing

I wonder what I was doing before that took up all my frame time I never properly instrumented the zones because the build time was just so bad that took priority

anyway I just need to start writing scene graph code now and then start on game code

[brisk chasm]

you done goofed up

somewhere

[cloud rivet]

I bet it was probably heap allocation somewhere each frame, maybe when rebuilding the scene graph

[cloud rivet]

https://github.com/btipling/Rosy/blob/9010c34ff2a60696534392d701d362ccf28b95ae/src/app/rhi/rhi_mesh.cpp#L377

this was dumb

idk

anyway

on to new things

[cloud rivet]

I think the first game play thing I will do is add recast and just figure out click and point pathing, have a scene with just a floor and move a demo cube around with click and point

in yesterday's stream unvestigate explained his use of recast and navmesh in great detail and it was really helpful

[wraith urchin]

Might wanna get sponza running first

[cloud rivet]

yeah

I mean after that

[wraith urchin]

then you can pathfind around sponza

[cloud rivet]

I don't think sponza will look like any of my levels

[brisk chasm]

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/hintze-hall-vr-tour-058b26fb31ed49df978de31af3dc091f or this guy

[cloud rivet]

well I got the scene graph stuff working

I need to do textures next

I don't want to reboot ever again

build time is now 4.89 s and frame time finally dropped a little bit, about down to 2K FPS from 2.5K, frame time increased to about 400microseconds from 300ish

still all way better than any of this was before the reboot

[slender ember]

I wouldn't stare at the microseconds too much at this stage. It's fully possible that GPU driver simply behaves differently with so little to do.

No offense of course 😄 I just meant compared to a full game scene

[cloud rivet]

oh right I understand. I guess I'm monitoring it because before I restarted my project I got into trouble with build time (79 seconds, and much slower frames for the same amount of geometry). I am new to Vulkan and C++ and I got myself into a pickle and have just been climbing out of it

[slender ember]

Yep, it's your project so you are free to optimize however you want. Just know that your hotspots in the whole pipeline are gonna be different with a few objects vs a few hundred/thousand objects.

[cloud rivet]

yes that makes a lot of sense, thank you

[slender ember]

Also, keep in mind that GPUs generally don't really like rendering at thousands of frames per second.

I mean the hardware isn't really setup to do that.

Or so I've heard, not really sure if it actually hurts the hardware or not. But I would probably cap it at like 500fps or something anyway.

[cloud rivet]

yes I will target 60

flecs has a way to cap frames I used to use in the past

I may use that or just write my own thing

[slender ember]

Right

There is something called "coil whine" which may occur with very high frame rates, but a quick googling seems to suggest it's not gonna be harmful to the hardware.

It's annoying though 🙂

But yeah, vsync is probably still the "right" way to limit framerates, but in today's world with 17 different ways of doing vsync or whatever, it's handy to have a software based limiter as well if you need it.

[cloud rivet]

coil whine doesn't sound good at all heh

[slender ember]

It's not and it can vary between GPUs. Some have it, some don't.

[cloud rivet]

I actually have no idea how to do vsync with vulkan, with opengl and glfw I could change the swap interval, now I just rely on the present mode swapchain interval when my fence is released it tells me another swapchain image is ready I draw another frame

[slender ember]

It's set through the VkPresentModeKHR IIRC (it's been years since I have done raw vulkan)

https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/latest/man/html/VkPresentModeKHR.html

[cloud rivet]

yes

I am using a pretty conservative present mode

[slender ember]

Anyway, I don't blame you if you get confused by vsync. I am too 😄

Just when you think you have it covered nvidia releases something like g-sync, and then you have to figure that out.

Or FreeSync

Or adaptive vsync

[wraith urchin]

In OpenGL FreeSync/G-Sync "just work" for me (as long as vsync is enabled), do you have to do anything to enable them in Bulkan?

[slender ember]

I don't know actually. It's my understanding that there are some "best practices" when it comes to settings if you want to get the best out of G-Sync, but I don't know if the graphics API matters.

Stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/agsulk/proper_g_sync_settings_recommended_by_blurbusters/

I should add that I don't have a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor, so I don't know if the above tips are worthwhile.

[wraith urchin]

I don't really understand the purpose of gsync with vsync off. It's kinda weird that it's even an option tbh

[slender ember]

The tip I have seen in multiple places is to specificaly have it off in the game's settings, but then forced on in nvidia's control panel.

[wraith urchin]

Ah I see, I wish we could get some developer docs from AMD/Nvidia

The reddit crowd tends to be susceptible to magical thinking 😉

[slender ember]

Aint that the truth.

The original "BlurBusters" article is something I have seen linked in several places though, so it might be worth looking into.

https://blurbusters.com/gsync/gsync101-input-lag-tests-and-settings/

That thing.

Anyway, I am gonna stop polluting Bjorn's project with G-Sync now 😄

[cloud rivet]

I don’t mind! Thanks for the knowledge sharing. I went quiet because it was 4am and I needed sleep

I just need to add textures and then on to sponza

[wraith urchin]

Yeah the west coast just woke up

[cloud rivet]

I am typing on on my phone from bed lol

[slender ember]

It'll be sleepy time in Finland soon.

[wraith urchin]

There's always someone awake on this server

[slender ember]

Well, someone's gotta post those frogs

[silver slate]

Free thread advertising.

[cloud rivet]

When I said I didn’t understand vsync with vk I more meant as a means to get a nice frametime cap. The mailbox present mode with 3 swapchain images setup I have prevent any screen tearing as with my fence I don’t draw until presentation is done. That’s why I suggested I would use a software solution

There’s not any way I know off to cap via SDL and vk like I would with OpenGL

I just get another image and I start a frame

[wraith urchin]

Maybe there's some kinda thing you can wait on?

[cloud rivet]

Yeah flecs has a thing

[wraith urchin]

I remember back when I did DOS programming vertical retrace was just a register you read from. You had to poll it and make sure you present during that window

[slender ember]

Low-tech solution:

double dt = mTimer.getTimeSinceLastUpdate();
if(RenderOptions::getBool(RenderOptions::OPTION_FRAMERATE_CAP) &&
    !RenderOptions::getBool(RenderOptions::OPTION_ENABLE_VSYNC) &&
    mMaxFramerate > 0)
{
    BASIS_PROFILE("Wait for target delta time");

    double minDeltaTime = 1.0 / (double)mMaxFramerate;

    while(dt < minDeltaTime)
    {
        mTimer.update();
        dt += mTimer.getTimeSinceLastUpdate();
    }
}

[cloud rivet]

set_target_fps https://www.flecs.dev/flecs/group__world__frame.html#ga112fad901867482f02cec9f530224076

[wraith urchin]

Seems odd to have that functionality in an ecs

[slender ember]

Yeah, why does the ECS care about "frames" at all?

Shouldn't you in theory be able to create an ECS in local space, fill it with stuff, query it a few times and then throw it away?

Though I guess these days flecs might be some kind of framework covering more than just an ECS?

[wraith urchin]

What made you choose flecs over EnTT?

[slender ember]

*Local scope, not local space

[wraith urchin]

Oh right bjorn doesn't like templates is probably why 😉

[slender ember]

Well, who does? 😄

[wraith urchin]

I legit love templates

Why write something twice

[slender ember]

slowly steps backwards

[cloud rivet]

I bet @thin oxide has a written about why flecs has this api somewhere. The guideline docs discuss integrating flecs pipeline in the context of frames

[cloud rivet]

flecs amazing I really like it, I have not spent much time with entt, just start using flecs and it waa magic

[slender ember]

Joking aside, more power to you. Templates was one of the main reasons I started moving towards zig.

[cloud rivet]

I actually added a small template function. I don’t mind them sparingly. I just don’t want massive meta programming

[wraith urchin]

Most of my algorithms are templated

[cloud rivet]

Also I am sure flecs C++ uses templates

[slender ember]

Oh sure, I use templates. Doesn't mean I like them

[wraith urchin]

render_meshes is a template in my engine

[slender ember]

Well templates are a way to write generic functions, and data types, and I don't have a problem with that. A LOT of my zig is using comptime generics, which is the same thing, just differently presented.

[cloud rivet]

Yeah generics are handy it’s just horrible in C++ compared to other implementations with bad errors, random stuff unrelated stuff breaking when you get things wrong,the lack of editor support while editing and the mix of templates and macros in fastgltf and vk bootstrap just make the code require a lot of reading to figure out basic stuff if you don’t have prior context

[cloud rivet]

zig comptime is lovely

[slender ember]

It really is.

Anywho, I wish I liked C++ templates, I just don't.

[wraith urchin]

Have you guys tried C++ concepts? It fixes many of the issues with older style templates

[cloud rivet]

I am not familiar with that

[wraith urchin]

It's available in C++20, which I think most of us are on now

If a template is written with constraints and concepts it both looks more readable and gives better error messages when it fails

[cloud rivet]

YesI am on latest

That sounds great actually

[wraith urchin]

Alot of libraries still support 17 so don't use them, but you can use them

[cloud rivet]

I think it is like the worst when you get RAII errors because of a template bug. Because something somewhere got lost in some scope and you get an error about referencing a deleted type you aren’t using and the error line points to a macro

[wraith urchin]

Yeah macros are mostly bad IMO

A holdover from C

If you've even seen all the enable_if crap, that's all gone with constraints & concepts

[true moon]

From what I've seen it seems like flecs has more engine inside it than just a plain ECS database system

[cloud rivet]

You got your basic entities which are just integer handlers, then you got components and tags where tags are components without args, and you can create relationships between entities, relationships are I think just entities themselves, then you have systems that run code on queries,there other ways to run them. It all is scoped to worlds, which is like a namespace. The ecs state progresses through pipeline stages which you can configure to represent frame stages important to you

That’s my basic understanding of how flecs works, I simplified it a bit and I haven’t used v4 and I may have said something incorrect

I don’t know if there’s more engine like features. The frame rate thing seems like a utility

I suspect for my game nearly most of my gamecode will be in a system

That’s how I wrote blockens

I added a Level.cpp which translates all the gameplay objects to graphics objects and then Graphics.cpp just runs the graphics objects through the render pipeline

I have a graphics objects storage buffer and each surface gets a pointer to whatever graphics object it belongs to in the shader

Level.cpp also knows where things are in the world and knows about all the geometry, it just doesn’t know about how stuff gets rendered just what state is needed for rendering

I am set up nicely for game play I think

We’ll see

I am sticking with it, I am done bike shedding

If this makes for a bad game I will make the next game differently

I am not revisiting any of this low level stuff right now

Once I have textures and add CSM back I am basically done with vk code. I will just be adding pbr images to gltf and change matrials and transforms in Level.cpp

No plans to use compute atm

Oh maybe I want decals

At some point

[steady venture]

My experience has been the exact opposite; it got worse over time imo. I started with 2008, then 12, 13 15 17 and 19. Specifically, intellisense got more shit. I also used more and more features of c++, especially templates. But still, it is nowhere near fast as it should be.

Although, I installed 2022 and so far, intellisense is not bad at all. It's responsive at least, ctrl + shift + space consistently gives me the function signatures. And it knew what ctre types were instantly, unlike 2019 which treated it as some foreign entity.

[cloud rivet]

Oh and particles

[steady venture]

Seems so from my limited experience so far. Hopefully it stays that way 🤞

[steady venture]

Yeah I was shocked 7-8 years ago when my brand new gtx 1080 was purring while studying graphics, with 3000+ fps on simple scenes. And then I learnt what coil whine is 🙂
I think it's a cool phenomenon, but I'd be annoyed if it did this on 60+ fps instead of thousands-ish fps.

[brisk chasm]

my 4070 whines when i play X4 locked at 75Hz 😄

[steady venture]

Damn that's annoying

[brisk chasm]

god knows why, other games dont

[steady venture]

Iirc, each coil whine case may be due to a different part of the chipset making this noise. Although I doubt that X4 stresses the part of the chip no other game does

Weird

[brisk chasm]

yeah its weird

the engine is also as old as the universe

[wraith urchin]

Coils vibrate it's just physics, there's not much you can do about it

[brisk chasm]

but after a few mins i dont hear it anymore

i could try to play with nvidias control panel perhaps, but i cba

[steady venture]

I used to have my case on my desk back when I had a huge L desk and being 40-50 cm to the left of the case I could hear everything

Now I have it under the desk and I don't hear anything

[thin oxide]

Flecs, bevy, DOTS, others have utilities to schedule & run systems. So a "frame" for the ECS is basically just run all systems for one tick

Not related to graphics stuff

[steady venture]

@cloud rivet You probably stated this before but I missed it; What are your goals for A) specifically Rosy and B) studying graphics in general?
IIRC, graphics is a hobby for you. I understand you have a game to develop after you develop Rosy? Are there any commercial/finanical expectations for your game? Or is it a passion thing?

[cloud rivet]

I want to make a game now and use the code I have to do it. I plan on continuing to read and learn, but more focused on making an actual game now

It’s still just a hobby

I don’t plan like on releasing anything

[steady venture]

Gotcha 👍 Looking forward to your upgrades, so far you have a good pace it seems

[cloud rivet]

If people want to try and build my repo I won’t stop them, it won’t have any assets though

[steady venture]

How's Vulkan treating you so far

I'm still a GL noob

[cloud rivet]

I love vulkan, it just has zero mystery

It’s a lot of stuff to do to render is all

Vulkan makes shader life easier, because of bindless access to textures and data, and because I don’t have to worry about gpu glsl bugs.

[steady venture]

Nice, looking forward to messing with it

Soon I hope

[cloud rivet]

if you're already comfortable with opengl and you want to learn graphics programming I think it will be a bit of a time sink and while I prefer vulkan it did take 3 months of my time to transition

well I also was learning C++ at the same time and well 1 month was gltf and CSM stuff

so probably would not take you as much time

[wraith urchin]

Also if you don't restart midway through 😉

[cloud rivet]

this is just a little bit of house keeping so I can move fast after

I will have crytek sponza at least loading by end of the week I think

I now have a much faster build time, faster frames, a whole bunch of bugs fixed and a custom asset format, and an idea for how to build a game ontop of all this

[cloud rivet]

well, today I got to the part where I export all of the base color image and sampler info from a gltf to my asset format and ktx2 images I converted from the gltf are getting uploaded to the gpu, but I still have to create the image view & sampled image sampler descripter sets and then I have to put all that into the material buffer and then update the shader to write from it, nearly there, was hoping to have deccer cubes done by the end of the weekend, I keep underestimating how complex gltf formats are and how many objects you have to create & manage with vk

hope to finish it up tomorrow, but it's a workday not a lot of time for all this stuff on workdays

I don't like leaving branches unmerged for the next day either :| can't merge this yet though, even though it builds and is fine, it just isn't complete https://github.com/btipling/Rosy/pull/33

[cloud rivet]

Currently manually converting all the images too with the nvidia texture app

Would like to automate but I need to just keep my eyes on getting to gameplay

So taking some shortcuts

That tool is awesome though, converts to ktx2 and generates mipmaps and can view them

[silver slate]

Gotta stay the course until it's done. :')

[cloud rivet]

The code I rebooted was like a “my first ever C++ project” kinda mess you can imagine it deserved to be rm -rf and it got what deserved.

I got some extra rm -rf laying around if you want one

[cloud rivet]

this is fake news now, SDL3 is released

[cloud rivet]

Yesterday I was stuck for about a full hour on just figuring out what I would call what is now Level.cpp. Just frozen, couldn’t make progress on code because of a naming issue

I still don’t like the name

[brisk chasm]

Game.cpp : >

[cloud rivet]

But I couldn’t not write code, but it was like a real problem for me and it didn’t feel good and I don’t remember having that happen before

[brisk chasm]

idk just ask yourself what that thing is supposed to contain

[cloud rivet]

I tried that

[brisk chasm]

its the bikeshed blockage

somebody locked you in

[cloud rivet]

Anyway it was like writers block or so

[brisk chasm]

yeah 🙂

[cloud rivet]

I have PTSD from previous version names and had to avoid them so no rhi or scene

I looked through C4, Frogfood etc for guidance

[brisk chasm]

https://github.com/deccer/OpenSpace/tree/main/src here have some more inspiration : >

[true moon]

game.cpp is what I called my first one

Now I call it something_test.cpp

physicstest.cpp, geodesytest.cpp, networktest.cpp, etc

[wraith urchin]

Contemplating making ASO open source just to traumatize you guys with the horrors inside of it

[true moon]

Same

But I don't think even that would convince deccer so idk if it's worth it

I already made a small demo game in the exact style of srs just so I could show him

[wraith urchin]

just a taste https://gist.github.com/pgrAm/8b2e38b4358040a3a385833dd1c32d8a

[true moon]

Here's the one place I use runtime polymorphism in my project

Global vector of structs of function pointers

[wraith urchin]

You basically just wrote your own vtable lmao

[true moon]

Yep

[wraith urchin]

At that point I'd just use inheritance

[true moon]

This made it a lot easier for networking

Plus it's easier to debug than inheritance

[cloud rivet]

do_downscale_shitty_lanczos3

[wraith urchin]

At some point I might remove the shitty part

[brisk chasm]

i am convinced that your stuff makes sense demon (unironically)

[cloud rivet]

that's the trouble, removing the shitty parts

[wraith urchin]

When it gets good

[brisk chasm]

the shitty parts will reveal themselves the more experience with the language and using it you get

[cloud rivet]

I should call it Shitty.cpp

[brisk chasm]

RosyDemo.cpp

[cloud rivet]

maybe I'll eventually have a Rosy Game Studio and Rosy's silhouette as the logo

the Rosy silhouette from my pfp

[cloud rivet]

I love Vulkan, and I am glad I switched, but I'm never recommending Vulkan to anyone ever again This adding images back from gltf has been so much work to do again lol. Even with bindless. I think maybe I had not fully evaluated how much work I had put into this before.

you know but once you do it you did it and you never have to do it again, or until the next reboot

[true moon]

hehe

[cloud rivet]

cool, my lighting is broken, I will fix tomorrow but

texture images ✅

https://github.com/btipling/Rosy/pull/33/files 23 commits and 722 lines to pull textures out of gltf and render

[cloud rivet]

fixed my lighting

[astral hinge]

https://tenor.com/view/american-psycho-impressive-very-nice-coping-patrick-bateman-gif-26518058

[cloud rivet]

I need to go to bed

[astral hinge]

Wait I thought Tracy showed its own fps

[cloud rivet]

so the frametimes are incorrect?

[astral hinge]

let me check

ah it's showing your app's frametime

I got confused because the tracy client also has a setting for the render rate

[cloud rivet]

nvidia shows the same thing in the overlay but I can't take a screenshot of it for some reason

idk

this is crytek not intel

[astral hinge]

nvm I'm double confused, tracy's setting is for the profiled app

[cloud rivet]

I'm I don't have any normal mapping or any of that yet

[astral hinge]

what you're seeing is your app's perf

[cloud rivet]

is that good or bad perf?

[astral hinge]

is 500 fps bad?

[cloud rivet]

the curtains have issues when I move, also I don't have any transparency or blending support yet

idk I have lots to do

[astral hinge]

probably aliasing. do you have mipmaps?

[cloud rivet]

yes

[astral hinge]

can you describe the "issues"

or show a vid

[cloud rivet]

it's in the bid

[astral hinge]

or flip-o-rama

oh what the heck

it looks like they're falling apart

[cloud rivet]

I can take a better image

maybe it's a sync issue

let me try ALL_COMMANDS

[astral hinge]

yeah the curtains are normal opaque geometry

maybe you're stomping on in-flight frame data like the camera matrix

[cloud rivet]

all commands donut fix it

hrm

I just update the camera buffer whenever

no sync nothing

that's probably it yeah?

no staging, just mapped