Screenshot Sunday?

I have been busy and had a bout of illness, so I haven't updated my blog in a while.  Mostly I've been researching new procedural content systems and re-reading SIGGRAPH papers while reworking my TDD.  Been looking into merging GPU clipmaps with the old 100% procedural voxel terrain system to allow easier content creation.  Also a lot of other stuff not worth showing even as a WIP like proc sun/sky.  Right now I'm going to focus on sun only tests for physically based light until approx phyiscal units for color temperature, intensity, et al are choosen.  Also various materials are being reworked to be more correct via tweaking until this is stood up for comparison with PBLs.

Right now my VR work on kagura is halted with the death of Linux SDKs for Occulus DK2.  One of the reasons I'm starting this blog back up is I hope to get a Vive kit this year.  In the meantime researching physically based lights and cameras along with other subsystems is a huge enough task.  Physically based shading is great, but you end up hitting a brick wall without the other two -- I suggest reading SIGGRAPH 2015 The Order 1886 slidedecks, and "Moving Frostbite to PBS" is still one of the better introductions.

Playing around with various light models and LoD again in the old mesh terrain test scene aka breaking things that used to work.  You might notice no IBL, no SSR, and no shadows in these; however they're not even the same BRDFs in the same materials in these shots either.  Easier to me to lower amount of variables.

KaAllocator / KaTask Refactor Cont

Now my hand works again I decided to do a little bit of coding tonight on my new allocator system.  Inspired by an old bitsquid blog post I decided to move to a full explicit allocator model, and reworked a ton of old subsystems ( like 2006 and older** ) to be more data-oriented as practice.  

Will soon be reworking the task management system to have easy dependencies.  Right now 'jobs' -- which are really tasks or jobs -- have to be explicitly enqueued or synced internal to their work unit.  This is because this code was written previous to modern task systems, which are now en vogue.  Instead it focused on specialized threads with process affinity and a collection of generic 'worker' threads.  Think render, game, io, general pool.  For example the screenshot 'job' would enqueue itself to the explicit renderthread to grab a framebuffer into memory -- HMD FBO, camera render target, or framebuffer -- then hop over to an encoder step and then finally explicit IO thread queue to dump out to disk / http.  What a pain.  Moving to a flatter generic system that can sit in a single ringbuffer is much easier to manage and debug.  A screenshot for systems code update blurb?  Sure why not!  Also cleaning up the embedded stats UI.  I want to put some of this on github at some point, so more people will think 'correctly' about this issue in the future.   :D

** The oldest source code had emacs mode lines, and was from the 90s.  :D

Snow and such

Well, got to bang on the hobby project a bit during Monday.  Mostly fixed particle emitters and some old rarely used timing code gearing up for the new curves based systems.  All the particles look ugly still, so here's a skeleton sneak:

Little tweaks here and there

Mostly worked on Lua R&D, minor polish, and content clean-up in the little time I spent this week.  Haven't had time to rig the new characters to demo the new animation system either.  Will be dropping all the old content not from CC0 / CCBy sources, so I can do a public demo once that is ready.  I also pruned a lot of the editor systems recently as I'm going to expand them with more in-game viewport editing support.  Progress is slow, but if there are new HMDs on the market by the end of the year with SDKs I plan to ship something to show off Linux GameDev + VR.  Yes, I am considering a VR specific editor mode too.  You won't believe how easy it is to spot issues in a level in VR!   :)

Dat water

Tweaked the basic tiled flow water shader and textures up a bit in between some other content fix up.  

In the middle of a brand new physically-based animation design / implementation  that is also data oriented.  Going for something pretty generic so curves can be used on everything from audiosource events, to UI, to of course IK blended skeleton animation.  Keeping everything SoA and flat arrays outside the high level user facing stuff of course.  Just something to do while doing some long work tasks over night I guess.  Haven't worked on an animation library from scratch in some time!

Bonus, post power outage dirt + freckles + eyes material fun:

Got 30mins in today

Played around with view weapons and such.  Awkward skeleton feels uncomfortable.

Ground work for grasping demo done

Got some assets and their physics setup while playing around with new light models and materials on previous content.  The best part is now if you try and stick your head into stuff you effectively get IK that will push the camera back in the game in a natural way.  It kind of feels like sliding your head down the wall when you try to peek through it.  Will likely do some proc animated enemies with a quick homemade ragdoll system next week if I get any free time.  Everyone loves ragdolls and physics fun.  Sword play, archery, and a little magic are still the goals for the public demo.   If you have a DK2, some move controllers, and are a Linux developer that wants to test stay in touch over the next couple of months.  Yeah hobby project.  Also looking into getting networked game sessions working again on a related note.  Coop VR RPG, anyone?  I'm looking for more CC0 and CCBy content I can modify for the demo too if you see any!  :)