First of all: thanks a lot for the amount of feedback and support we received from the community. I think the amount of code changes in this release is a reflection of the strong feeback. Keep it coming!
- Abstracted the application level by using the interface in IApp.h
- Refactored addShader, it now loads binary shaders and the interface is more abstract. This reduced the number of lines of code in every example. This is an intermediate step to achieving a more unified cross-platform shader system
- Upgraded the BRDF example to PBR
- Removed Panini projection feature to add it into the new Middleware_3 folder
- Added the Fluid Studio memory manager after getting permission from the original author
- Fixed all bugs in issue tracker
- First iOS support. Please see iOS software and hardware requirements below.
- Added support for on-tile textures
- In the moment there is no UI and the camera and the input system is basic. We are planning to add https://github.com/jkuhlmann/gainput in the future
- PC:
- Added a Visual Studio extension that allows to compile shaders with a right mouse click on the shader file (need to be installed from the Tools folder or by clicking on the PRE_BUILD.bat file)
- Improved GPU recognition: in case a notebook has an integrated GPU and a discreete GPU: it will pick the discreete GPU under certain conditions
- Now use raw mouse input to workaround the problems with the last Windows 10 update
- Better synchronization between CPU and GPU
- Moved to Visual Studio 2017 and Windows SDK 16299.91 (Fall Creators Update) and Vulkan SDK 1.0.68
- XBOX One: numerous performance improvements (check the non-public repository history log)
Any rendering framework needs a test farm that makes sure it is running on all the devices and OS'es supported. Our current testing setup is based on Jenkins and only supports a rather narrow range of hardware devices. We will add more hardware devices over time; this also depends when and how we get ahold of them. Considering that the feature set of The Forge is forward looking with support for Vulkan, DirectX 12 and Metal 2, we will leave out a lot of older hardware. We already started a conversation with Intel and Apple about the challenges we have and we will get in touch with driver teams from Samsung, Qualcomm,Google, AMD, NVIDIA and others to provide feedback on drivers.