ConfettiFX/The-Forge V1.53

Release 1.53 - October 5th, 2022 - Steamdeck Support | App life cycle changes | Shader Byte Code Offline Generation | GTAO Unit Test | Improved gradient calculation in Visibility Buffer | New C Containers | Reorg TF Directory Structure | Upgraded to newer ImGUI | The Forge Blog

on GitHub

Release 1.53 - October 5th, 2022 - Steamdeck Support | App life cycle changes | Shader Byte Code Offline Generation | GTAO Unit Test | Improved gradient calculation in Visibility Buffer | New C Containers | Reorg TF Directory Structure | Upgraded to newer ImGUI | The Forge Blog

The Starfield Official Gameplay Reveal Trailer is out. It always brings us pleasure to see The Forge running in AAA games like this:

We added The Forge to the Creation Engine in 2019.

The Forge made an appearance during the Apple developer conference 2022. We added it to the game "No Man's Sky" from Hello Games to bring this game up on macOS / iOS. For the Youtube video click on the image below and jump to 1:22:40

• We switched our Linux OS to Manjaro to have an easier upgrade path to the Steamdeck. Please note the changed Linux requirements below.

• Shader byte code can now be generated offline.

  • Shader binaries are compiled through FSL
  • Introduced ShaderList files that determine all the binary shaders that FSL needs to produce. Defines, shader target and other specific configuration can be specified per shader binary declaration
  • Update all projects (UT, VB, Aura, Ephemeris) to use the new ShaderLists
  • Remove all ShaderStageLoadDesc::pMacros, shaders are compiled offline through ShaderLists
  • Remove all Renderer::pBuiltinShaderDefines, all configuration is done through FSL

• Over the last few projects we had always challenges with EASTL. So over the last 9 months we slowly removed it and replaced it by new C language based containers that prefer stack allocations over heap allocations.
  There is a new unit test that helps us to test the new libraries.

For string management:
bstrlib

For dynamic arrays and hash tables:
stb_ds.h

There is a new unit test to make sure those new containers are tested. It is called 36_AlgorithmsAndContainers

• We changed the App life cycle: modern APIs have so many ways to reset the driver or reload assets, so we made a more flexible "reload" mechanism that generalizes all the special cases we had in there before.

  • App extended with reload functionality by making use of ReloadDesc* parameter for the Load/Unload functions
  • define reload/reset descriptors structs
  • define reload/reset enum types
  • Updated OS base files regarding new structs
  • Able to reload shaders on all examples
    This is a breaking change to all of our rendering interfaces.

• New Animation test that unifies most of the former animation tests into one. This way we can save some testing time in our Jenkins setup.

• We added a new unit test called 38_AmbientOcclusion_GTAO. It implements the paper "Practical Real-Time Strategies for Accurate Indirect Occlusion" by Jorge Jimenez et. all.

macOS

PC

PS4

PS5

Switch

XBOX

• We improved the gradient calculation in the Visibility Buffer. Thanks to Stephen Hill @self_shadow who brought this to our attention.

• We reorganized the whole TF directory structure to allow development in more areas. Here is an image representing the new structure:

What is still missing is the "Render Abstraction Layer", "Scene Loader" and we have to populate the "Game Layer" more.

• We upgraded to ImGUI 1.88 to get access to the docking feature. In the process we improved the ImGUI integration substantially.

• We started a blog for The Forge at The-Forge-Blog. We have no idea where we can find the time to write blog posts ... let's see what is happening ...

• Retired Unit/Functional Tests:

  • 08_GltfViewer - generally glTF is not a model format that is applicable for game development. So we use it as an intermediate format in the Resource loader. In the future we might only use it in the offline asset pipline. The main idea is to extract the data and bring it into a form that is usable in games. Unfortunately many people thought that the glTF viewer is a good model to start with. So we want to guide them in the right diretion here by not offering direct access to a glTF reader anymore.
  • Most of the animation unit tests are now merged into 21_Animations, to reduce our hardware testing time. Our Jenkins testing environment that tests all platforms before someone can merge code is taking too long.