github ConfettiFX/The-Forge v1.30
Release 1.30 - June 28th, 2019 - Ephemeris 2 - New Skydome System | Android Unit Tests | New Entity Component System | SoLoud Audio

latest releases: v1.57, v1.56, v1.55...
5 years ago
  • Ephemeris 2: this is a new volumetric skydome system developed for PS4 / XBOX One class of hardware. Click on the image to watch a video:

Ephemeris 2

For Ephemeris and the rest of our commercial custom middleware there is now a new GitHub repository here Custom-Middleware

We also have a skydome system for mobile hardware called Ephemeris 1, that will be released on GitHub later.

  • Android: we are supporting now more and more unit tests in Android by improving the run-time support. Here are screenshots:

01_Transformations
01_Transformations

02_Compute
02_Compute

05_FontRendering
05_FontRendering

09_LightAndShadow
09_LightAndShadow

13_imGUI
13_imGuI

17_EntityComponentSystem
17_EntityComponentSystem

We added the Samsung S10 Galaxy phone (Qualcomm Adreno 640 Graphics Card (Vulkan 1.1.87)) to the test devices for Android.

  • ENTT: we decided to remove ENTT and replace it with our own ECS system that we use internally for tools. ENTT in debug is too slow for practical usage because it decreases execution speed and increases compile times substantially. It appears that "modern C++ 17" and probably also "modern C++ 14" is not ready for usage in a team environment because it decreases productivity too much. We tried to remove C++ 17 and 14 features to make it run faster but it ended up too much work. We went from more than 200 ms with ENTT to 60 ms with our own ECS running a Debug build on a Intel Core i7-6700T 2.8GHz. In release our own system is in the moment not as fast as ENTT but we will fix that.

  • Audio: we did a first pass on integrating SoLoud for all our platforms. There is a new unit test:

26_Audio

  • Linux: following STEAM, we are switching to the Mesa RADV driver in our test environment for AMD GPUs. For NVIDIA GPUs we are still using the NVIDIA driver.

  • Texture Asset pipeline: we did a first pass on a unified texture asset pipeline. On the app level only the name of the texture needs to be provided and then depending on the underlying platform it will attempt to load the "optimal compressed" texture, which in the moment is either KTX or dds. In the future there will be Google Basis support as well.

    • Removed support for various non-optimal texture file formats - png, jpg, tga, hdr, exr
    • Add ASTC support for iOS through KTX container
    • Add compressed textures for all unit test resources
    • Add BC6H signed and unsigned float variants

Please make sure you download the art asset zip file again with the help of the batch file.

  • Issue list:
    • issue #109 "Texture updates broken" is fixed now
    • NVIDIA GTX 1660 bug: this card with the Vulkan run-time and driver 419.35 became unresponsive, while the DirectX 12 run-time works as expected. Any other NVIDIA GPU works fine ... this looks like a driver bug ...

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