github ConfettiFX/The-Forge v1.47
Release 1.47 - December 18th, 2020 - OpenGL ES 2.0 Android support | Device Reset Support | DRED / Breadcrumb support | Lua driven functional tests | DX11 refactor | YUV support through Vulkan

latest releases: v1.57, v1.56, v1.55...
3 years ago

As the year winds slowly down, we finally found time to do another release. First of all, Happy Holidays and a happy new Year!

Happy Holidays and a happy new Year!

Most of us will take off over the Holiday season and spent time with their families. We should be back online in the middle of January 2021.

  • OpenGL ES 2.0: TF will run on probably several hundred million of mobile devices in the future. It will be the rendering layer of business application frameworks. For this usage case, we added OpenGL ES 2.0 support only for Android. The OpenGL ES 2.0 layer only supports unit tests 1, 5, 12 and 31 at the moment.
  • Device change / reset: we finally implemented all the code that can deal with device changes, device resets or device removed scenarios on all platforms. The underlying design was always there but it took us 3+ years to finally add the functionality :-)
    When you go into any of the *OSBase.* files you can find a snippet of code that looks like this:
if (pApp->mSettings.mResetGraphics) 
	{
		pApp->Unload();
		pApp->Load();
		pApp->mSettings.mResetGraphics = false;
	}
  • DRED / Breadcrumb support: to be able to better tell what the reason behind a removed device is, we implemented DRED support on PC with DirectX 12 and XBOX. We integrated this into the first functional test 01_Transformations. Here is a screenshot. Look for the "Simulate crash" button:

Image of the Transformations Unit test

Breadcrumb are user defined markers used to pinpoint which command has caused GPU to stall.
In the Breadcrumb unit test, two markers get injected into the command list.
Pressing the crash button would result in a GPU hang.
In this situation, the first marker would be written before the draw command, but the second one would stall for the draw command to finish.
Due to the infinite loop in the shader, the second marker won't be written, and we can reason that the draw command has caused the GPU to hang.
We log the markers' information to verify this.
Check out this link for more info: D3D12 Device Removed Extended Data (DRED)

  • More Lua Scripting support for all functional tests:
    • For the scripted testing of the Unit Tests, this layer provides automated function registration of the UI elements to Lua State.
    • Any UI elements added to the GUI will add a function or a pair of function(Getter/Setter) to the Lua state for using them in any script.
      Lua function name resolution will work like this:
    • UI Widget "label" name will be included in the function name as follows,
      • For Widget events: label name + "Event Name". e.g., Lua Function name for label - "Press", and event - OnEdited : "PressOnEdited"
      • For Widget modifiers such as ints / floats: "Set" and "Get" function pair will be added as a prefix to label name e.g., "X" variable will have "SetX" and "GetX" pair of functions.
  • After writing the scripts, you can let the layer know about the scripts using AddTestScripts() function call and run them on any frame by RunTestScript() defined in UIApp class. There are examples of these test scripts in most of the UTs showing how you can also add these scripts to UI and test them on runtime.

Here is how the current Lua support in the functional tests might look like:

Lua support

  • DX11 refactor: we re-wrote the DX11 run-time a few times. We ended up with the most straighforward version. This version only recently shipped in Hades along with the Vulkan run-time on PC.

  • YUV support: we have now YUV support for all our Vulkan API platforms PC, Linux, Android and Switch. There is a new functional test for YUV. It runs on all these platforms:

YUV unit test

  • Audio: we removed the audio functional test. It was the only test that was released unfinished and didn't run on all our platforms. Our customers show love for FMOD ... would make more sense to show an integration of that.

  • GitHub issues fixed:

    • #188 - typo - lowercase L in first DepthStencilClearFlags constant "ClEAR_DEPTH"
    • #186 - Ubuntu: Examples fail to build
    • #182 - Flickering on master when vsync is off
    • #176 - [08_GlftViewer] Application crash on missing resource

Numerous other fixes ...

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