#Written from scratch custom VRAD - XenorRAD:tm:

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

grand cloak
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Default VRAD:

Garrysmod_Screenshot_2025.12.26_-_20.46.14.86.png
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XenorRAD:

Garrysmod_Screenshot_2025.12.26_-_20.47.23.08.png
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Default VRAD:

Garrysmod_Screenshot_2025.12.26_-_20.46.34.23.png
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XenorRAD:

Garrysmod_Screenshot_2025.12.26_-_20.47.03.73.png
grand cloak
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XenorRAD on the left and VRAD on the right

XenorRAD took 17 seconds to compile, VRAD took 35 seconds

obrazek.png obrazek.png
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both -final

grand cloak
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fixed lightmap filtering, now light scatteres more evenly around geometry edges
also added adaptable shadow sampling, meaning near geometry edges it uses more shadow samples to resolve multiple light hits and uniformly smoothes them
for example this now is set to 24 near edge and 16 for rest

obrazek.png obrazek.png
scenic swift
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if from scratch write it on CUDA then or something else
would better

grand cloak
grand cloak
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i supposed i could add OpenGL and do it via GPU

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but dont care

candid laurel
buoyant tapir
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oh shit nice

lilac mason
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bro that pfp 💀

buoyant tapir
lilac mason
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but yeah its actually better if you do this stuff via the gpu ngl

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its more fit for that kind of things

languid notch
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that actually a interessing project, will be open source ?

jagged parcel
grand cloak
grand cloak
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since i learnt that people are ungrateful

daring hound
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thats one quick way to kill the project

grand cloak
jagged parcel
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well, have fun hehe

grand cloak
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and VRAD is just too slow to work with and doesnt quite meet my expectations but worth to note, its already 30x faster than VRAD without SIMD improvements and i think ill also add OpenGL to accelerate some parts

lilac mason
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omw to make my own vrad in luajit with gpu shit 🚎

daring hound
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a faster vvis would be peak tbh

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vrad is barely ever the slow factor

lilac mason
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guess what
the gpu works for that too

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so pay me some

sly hollow
daring hound
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im not a mapper

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aint paying you shit!!!

lilac mason
vague canyon
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yeah vrad is easy to parallelize, vvis depends on an algorithm that is almost entirely serial

vague canyon
daring hound
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because vrad++ doesnt i think

lilac mason
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p sure it does

daring hound
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yay

grand cloak
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yall are really supportive

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because i never seen since someone to rewrite the VRAD

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not rewrite but from scratch VRAD

tame snow
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Seems like a cool project

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It's a shame it isn't open source, though

grand cloak
daring hound
grand cloak
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fact

daring hound
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even king terry the terrible understood the value of opensource projects

grand cloak
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i want to first beta test it on larger maps and with experienced mappers so i wont open source some trash

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and some cleanup in the codebase also will be fit

tame snow
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I wonder how possible it would be to create an end-to-end replacement for the map compilation pipeline where each individual step is replaceable

daring hound
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thats entirely fair 👍

daring hound
grand cloak
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byte by byte identical literally

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or else you gonna end up like me with 1 gb crash log folder until i got it just right

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I experimented with VoxelGI instead of radiosity for gmod

obrazek.png
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but its hard to do so i scrapped it and continuing with just XenoRAD which is basically modern and efficient VRAD

tame snow
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How large are the final lighting textures?

grand cloak
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basically i voxelized the whole map and calculated so by inject each voxel and doing light propagations

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but its was so blocky that denoising and smoothing it would be inefficient and slower than regular radiosity

grand cloak
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also im only shipping HDR only

tame snow
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I mean in terms of resolution and disk size

grand cloak
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vrad does about 8mb whilst mine did 5mb

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so it makes huge difference in larger maps

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but its too early to compare it

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since i also need to implement static props lighting

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geometry lighting is now fully complete at this point

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safe to say its better than VRAD could ever be without huge rewrite

sly hollow
bright belfry
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Make it open source.

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Even if the codebase isn't in a great state.

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Making it FOSS will be beneficial in the long run.

main idol
daring hound
split wind
candid laurel
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workaround using sourcesdk2013mp

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just mix and match your compilers til it’s all fine and dandy ❤️

candid laurel
bright belfry
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how unoptimized and overly complex are your maps for gmod of all things that vvis is main point of slowdown/bottlenecking in your map compile

grand cloak
scenic swift
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I never ran into vvis issues, but vrad was really slow in SDK

candid laurel
grand cloak
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damn

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i gotta make it GPU accelerated

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cuz its only like approx. 10-15 seconds gains

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also gonna add SIMD for vector math operations

tame snow
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GPU accelerated might be able to do it real fuckin’ quick

grand cloak
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but its just direct lighting i need to also implement indirect

grand cloak
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Added path tracing for indirect lighting calculations

This is 1024 rays per luxel

obrazek.png obrazek.png
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I now dont need to do Ambient occlusion pass since AO is results of path traced lighting similiar to blender cycles

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This is 512 rays per luxel

512.webp
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14.9 million rays per second with total of 2,08 billion total rays casted
somewhat reasonable altough RTX cards do it like 100x faster

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both with 16 progressive passes

latent edge
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holy shit

tame snow
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If it's not time consuming to do, it would be interesting to see a series of comparison screenshots taken from the same position/angle/fov with different ray counts
I'm curious about how quickly you get diminishing returns on adding additional rays

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If the camera is aligned exactly the same between the images, it would be possible to compare two ray counts (e.g. 1024 vs 512) and subtract the pixels of the 512 image from the 1024 image to visualize exactly what the additional rays add to the final 1024 image

grand cloak
latent edge
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im guessing this is a private compiler

grand cloak
latent edge
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shame

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would've been cool to test out

grand cloak
latent edge
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you planning to release it as a executeable?

grand cloak
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yes

latent edge
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based

grand cloak
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gonna ship it alongside opengl dll and shader file

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since it uses OpenGL

latent edge
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how fast in percentage wise is it compared to stock vrad, gmod vrad, vrad++?

grand cloak
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and vrad++ is just vrad from source sdk 2013 improved

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mine is literally written from scratch and i just use the same lightmap rgb encoding function since garrys mod is very picky to literal bytes

latent edge
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did you just say 49 minutes to 6 seconds

grand cloak
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yeah

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but it shouldnt be surprising since VRAD was written in like 2003 and was targeting Windows 95

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mine is written using bleeding edge and the latest compiler tools since its written completely from scratch in Visual Studio 2026

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but it wasnt like week project i was working on it for like 3-4 weeks dealing with constant crashes of gmod and bugs

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and its still not complete for example i have to finish prop_static lighting and their shadow casting

latent edge
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what would the process be if requesting access to this compiler...

grand cloak
latent edge
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what chances...

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im banned from it

grand cloak
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they usually give me feedback for example synapse t6 showed a larger gaps in my compiler which caused me to rollback to older version and rewrite the computer shader

grand cloak
latent edge
latent edge
edgy pond
candid laurel
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@grand cloak keep us updated

grand cloak
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threw away OpenGL and swapped to Vulkan API

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also im gonna drop support for path tracing since its computionally very expensive and only people with RTX cards would have great compile times

edgy pond
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okay

grand cloak
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Partially implemented prop_static

oasbasd.png obrar1.png
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prop_dynamics isnt handled (as far as i know) by the VRAD so these are untouched

image.png
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the XenorRAD is now fully utilizing Vulkan Graphics API altough it needs a bit more care since Windows TDR doesnt like it (it falsely identifies it)

candid laurel
jagged tusk
grand cloak
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Added ETA approximation when the map compiliation will be finished in each batch dispatch

grand cloak
daring hound
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how does this compare to vrad++

buoyant tapir
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vrad++ is just some fixes ontop of vrad isnt it

grand cloak
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VRAD on steroids

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and using path tracing to calculate global illumination

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based on that article

grand cloak
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instead of 30 minutes of waiting to compile map its done under 30 seconds

grand cloak
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i want to enter map contest later with my vrad

edgy pond
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nice

grand cloak
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I have decided to put this project to halt and instead directly improve and gpu accelerate vrad from source sdk and improve vbsp and vvis.

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I will make another thread in waywo once I will have a ready to install version of vrad for public testing.

slow lantern
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can i have mor rooms on darkrp_downtown_tits with this

grand cloak
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i already have my own version of luajit where i introduced preprocessing statements and other modifications

lilac mason
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but yeah adding lua into tools is POG

grand cloak
scarlet pier
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That's a great idea but rn ur vrad makes funky gi, you should make you own discord server for the project.

Idea is great but as any project it needs a lot of work done before release.(I started similar proj myself but it uses path tracing for baking, I won't finish it any time soon tho.)