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Learn about game development technology

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True Single-Pass Stereo Rendering in Turbo Game Engine

Virtual reality rendering is very demanding on hardware for two reasons. First, the refresh rate of most VR headsets is 90 hz instead of the standard 60 hz refresh rate most computer monitors operate at. This means that rendering must complete in about 11 milliseconds instead of 16. Second, we have to render the scene twice with two different views, one for each eye. Without any special optimizations, this roughly means that we have to pack 16 milliseconds worth of rendering code into five milli
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Loading Binary and Embedded GLTF files

It turns out GLTF is actually three different file formats. ? Textures can be loaded from external files, embedded in a binary .glb file, but they can also be saved in an ASCII GLTF files using base64 encoding. Having three different ways to store textures is not a good design decision, but at least it's better than the disaster called Collada. (Note to Khronos: If your file format specification has more pages than a Tom Clancy novel it probably sucks.) Our GLTF loader now supports files wi
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Leadwerks 5 beta Update

A new beta is available with the following changes: Script prefixes are now changed to lowercase entity:Update(), entity:Start(), etc., as well as widget:Draw(), etc. This is because Entity() and Widget() are going to be functions to cast an object to that type. Sprites are now created on a sprite layer object. A sprite layer is created in a world and added to a camera. This allows control over what camera sees what set of sprites. See the examples for details. GUI system i
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GDC 2019

I have not gone in several years because everything we were doing revolved around Steam, and it just didn't seem very important. But this year I had some business to attend to so I spent the last three days in San Francisco. I still have a lot of friends in the game industry, and the reaction to my plans for the new engine was very positive. A few years ago people would have groaned at the idea of another engine, but it seems they are now bored with technology and very open to something new
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Vulkan Shader Compilation

One of the best points of Vulkan is how shaders are loaded from precompiled Spir-V files. This means GLSL shaders either work or they don't. Unlike OpenGL, there is no different outcome on Intel, AMD, or nVidia hardware. SPIR-V files can be compiled using a couple of different utilities. I favor LunarG's compiler because it supports #include directives. Shader.vert: #version 450 #extension GL_ARB_separate_shader_objects : enable #include "VertexLayout.glsl" layout(push_constant) unifo
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Uniform Buffers in Vulkan

Following this tutorial, I have managed to add uniform buffers into my Vulkan graphics pipeline. Since each image in the swapchain has a different graphics pipeline object, and uniform buffers are tied to a pipeline, you end up uploading all the data three times every time it changes. OpenGL might be doing something like this under the hood, but I am not sure this is a good approach. There are three ways to get data to a shader in Vulkan. Push constants are synonymous with GLSL uniforms, althoug
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Vulkan Render Pipeline

Having completed a hard-coded rendering pipeline for one single shader, I am now working to create a more flexible system that can handle multiple material and shader definitions. If there's one way I can describe Vulkan, it's "take every single possible OpenGL setting, put it into a structure, and create an immutable cached object based on those settings that you can then use and reuse". This design is pretty rigid, but it's one of the reasons Vulkan is giving us an 80% performance increase ove
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Starting with Shadowmaps on Vulkan

Now that we have lights working in our clustered forward Vulkan renderer (same great technique the latest DOOM games are using) I am starting to implement shadow maps. The first issue that came up was managing render-to-texture when the texture might still be in use rendering the previous frame. At first I thought multiple shadowmaps would be needed per light, like a double-buffering system, but that would double the number of shadow textures and video memory. Instead, I created a simple object
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Package Plugins and Mods

Leadwerks 4 supports compressed and encrypted game files in ZIP format, but there are many different custom package formats different games use. The plugin system in Leadwerks 5 allows us to create importers for these different package formats so we can access content directly from commercial games you have installed on your computer. The example below shows how to load a VTF texture from the game Half-Life 2 directly from the game's install files. First we need to load some plugins to deal
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GMF2 SDK Update

The GMF2 SDK has been updated with tangents and bounds calculation, object colors, and save-to-file functionality. The GMF2 SDK is a lightweight engine-agnostic open-source toolkit for loading and saving of game models. The GMF2 format can work as a standalone file format or simply as a data format for import and export plugins. This gives us a protocol we can pull model data into and export model data from, and a format that loads large data much faster than alternative file formats.
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Terrain Normal Update Multithreading

Multithreading is very useful for processes that can be split into a lot of parallel parts, like image and video processing. I wanted to speed up the normal updating for the new terrain system so I added a new thread creation function that accepts any function as the input, so I can use std::bind with it, the same way I have been easily using this to send instructions in between threads: shared_ptr<Thread> CreateThread(std::function<void()> instruction); The terrain update nor
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Texture Load Plugins

Texture loading plugins allow us to move some big libraries like FreeImage into separate optional plugins, and it also allows you to write plugins to load new texture and image formats. To demonstrate the feature, I have added a working VTF plugin to the GMF2 SDK. This plugin will load Valve texture files used in Source Engine games like Half-Life 2 and Portal. Here are the results, showing a texture loaded directly from VTF format and also displayed in Nem’s nifty VTFEdit tool.
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Leadwerks 5 beta Update

A big update is now available for beta subscribers! Multipass Rendering You can use several cameras to increase the depth range or mix 2D and 3D graphics. 2D Graphics As discussed earlier, 2D graphics are now supported using persistent 2D objects. Depth Sorting Multiple layers of transparency will now render in correct order, with lighting in each layer. Note that I used an empty script called "null.lua" to prevent the glass surfaces here from being collapsed at loa
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GLTF Loader Update

The following changes have been made to the GLTF model loader: Correctly loaded rotations and orientations. Mesh collision caching for faster loading. Supports transforms with negative scale and correct face orientation. Support for adjustable alpha cutoff value. Support for KHR_materials_unlit extension (full bright materials). This model from SketchFab was useful for testing because it uses so many features of the GLTF format: https://sketchfab.com/
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Leadwerks 5 Beta Update

An update is available for the Leadwerks 5 beta. Shadow updating is fixed so the lights no longer turn black during the update whenever a shadow changes. We're now using multiview to draw all six faces of a cube shadow map in one single pass! Point light shadow updates are something that used to be a considerable bottleneck in Leadwerks 4, and their performance impact is now very insignificant. Thanks to Sascha Williams for his excellent Vulkan examples. Joints are finished, a new
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Leadwerks 5 Beta Updated

The GUIBlock structure now has an iVec4 "clipregion" member. This allows you to set a clipping region around a block to prevent it from drawing outside the region. The region will automatically be shrunk to show only the visible area of the widget, within the visible area of its parent. The purpose of this is to prevent text from overflowing outside of the widget. I found this necessary because the multi-line text area widget involves the dynamic creation of different persistent 2D elements, and
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How to Fix Slow Windows 10 (this week)

Here are some things I did in the last couple days to fix a computer that was basically unusable. It seems that Superfetch was rebranded to "SysMain" in an update and automatically re-enabled. If your computer is grinding away either the CPU or disk usage while doing nothing, this is the culprit. Disable it in Windows services. The XBox games bar is suspect. I recommend disabling it now that FRAPS supports Vulkan. Some features in Visual Studio are making it unusably slow. In
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3D GUI

Putting all the pieces together, I was able to create a GUI with a sprite layer, attach it to a camera with a texture buffer render target, and render the GUI onto a texture applied to a 3D surface. Then I used the picked UV coords to convert to mouse coordinates and send user events to the GUI. Here is the result: This can be used for GUIs rendered onto surfaces in your game, or for a user interface that can be interacted with in VR. This example will be included in the next beta upd
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Leadwerks 5 Beta Update

A new beta is uploaded with lots of new features and improvements. Things are really taking shape! Animation is now supported and it's really fast. Two examples are included. Package loader plugins now supported, VPK package loader for Source Engine games included with example. Added localization example. Shaders folder very neatly organized, now contains shader family files. Config folder eliminated. Engine headers cleaned up and organized. Lots
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Leadwerks 5 Beta Update

A new update is available for beta testers. Terrain The terrain building API is now available and you can begin working with it, This allows you to construct and modify terrains in pure code. Terrain supports up to 256 materials, each with its own albedo, normal, and displacement maps. Collision and raycasting are currently not supported. Fast C++ Builds Precompiled headers have been integrated into the example project. The Debug build will compile in about 20 seconds the first run
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Terrain in Leadwerks 5 Beta Updated

A new update is available for beta testers. This adds a new LOD system to the terrain system, fixes the terrain normals, and adds some new features. The terrain example has been updated ans shows how to apply multiple material layers and save the data. Terrain in LE4 uses a system of tiles. The tiles are rendered at a different resolution based on distance. This works great for medium sized terrains, but problems arise when we have very large view distances. This is why it is okay to
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Pixmap Class and DDS Saving

Textures in Leadwerks don't actually store any pixel data in system memory. Instead the data is sent straight from the hard drive to the GPU and dumped from memory, because there is no reason to have all that data sitting around in RAM. However, I needed to implement texture saving for our terrain system so I implemented a simple "Pixmap" class for handling image data: class Pixmap : public SharedObject { VkFormat m_format; iVec2 m_size; shared_ptr<Buffer> m_pixels; int
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Leadwerks 5 Beta Update

A new beta is available in the beta forum. This adds new texture and pixmap features, Basis texture support, and support for customized project workflows. Use of Basis textures brought the download size down to less than 300 megabytes. New Lua examples are included: Build Texture Build Cubemap SetSubPixels
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Streaming Terrain in Leadwerks Game Engine 5

The terrain system in Leadwerks Game Engine 4 allows terrains up to 64 square kilometers in size. This is big enough for any game where you walk and most driving games, but is not sufficient for flight simulators or space simulations. For truly massive terrain, we need to be able to dynamically stream data in and out of memory, at multiple resolutions, so we can support terrains bigger than what would otherwise fit in memory all at once. The next update of Leadwerks Game Engine 5 beta suppo
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Leadwerks Game Engine 5 Beta Update

An update is available for beta testers. What's new: GLTF animations now work! New example included. Any models from Sketchfab should work. Added Camera::SetGamma, GetGamma. Gamma is 1.0 by default, use 2.2 for dark scenes. Fixed bug that was creating extra bones. This is why the animation example was running slow in previous versions. Fixed bug where metalness was being read from wrong channel in metal-roughness map. Metal = R, roughness = G. T
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