This is the first release in 2019 and The Forge GitHub repository is today exactly one year old, with the first release on the same day last year :-) In 2018 we made 22 releases and we improved The Forge in many areas.
If you followed us so far ... why not just join us? We are looking for more graphics programmer joining our teams. We have offices in Encinitas, CA USA (Main) / Mumbai, India / Shanghai, China / Breda, Netherlands / St. Petersburg, Russia and in Lviv, Ukraine.
Now back to release notes: many years ago in 2012 / 2013, we helped AMD and Crystal Dynamics with the development of TressFX for Tomb Raider. We also wrote an article about the implementation in GPU Pro 5 and gave a few joint presentations on conferences like FMX. At the end of last year we revisited TressFX. We took the current code in the GitHub repository, changed it a bit and ported it to The Forge. It now runs on PC with DirectX 12 / Vulkan, macOS and iOS with Metal 2 and on the XBOX One. We also created a few new hair assets so that we can showcase it. Here are screenshots of our programmers art:
PC Windows DirectX 12 GTX 950 Driver 416.81:
iPad (Model A1803):
The current implementation is overall too slow to be used on some of our platforms but we are going to improve performance over time. We are also going to improve on the hair art assets.
Apart from Hair, the Material Playground now also has improved versions of Metal and a new material category Wood:
Metal:
Wood:
- Entity component system (ECS) for all platforms: we've chosen to integrate ENTT (https://github.com/skypjack/entt) into The Forge. The initial implementation was contributed by Amer Koleci @amerkoleci:
- Lua Scripting System for all platforms: the Lua scripting integration allows to register functions to lua contexts so these functions will be available via scripts. Functions can be static or lambda. In latter case you can store some state information within lambda. Scripts are executed using LuaManager::RunScript() or LuaManager::AddAsyncScript() methods. In second case scripts are still executed in synchronous way. Async execution implementation is planned. Also there is "updateable" script. It is loaded (at this point script main body is executed), then it can be "updated" - update() function from script is invoked. Script can invoke any registered function and can store state information which will be available from update to update. The script can be reloaded - can be useful for fast iterations when you just modify script and don't even need to restart application. If that script contains exit() function then it will be executed when script is reloaded or closed. Checkout unit test 06_MaterialPlayground for an example on how to use it. In this unit tests it executes three scripts to load models and textures and animate the camera.