This commit extend the technique of dynamic linked list to the mesh
slots so as to eliminate dumb scan or map lookup. It provides massive
performance improvement in the culling and in the rasterizer when
the majority of objects are static.
Other improvements:
- Compute the opengl matrix only for objects that are visible.
- Simplify hash function for GEN_HasedPtr
- Scan light list instead of general object list to render shadows
- Remove redundant opengl calls to set specularity, shinyness and diffuse
between each mesh slots.
- Cache GPU material to avoid frequent call to GPU_material_from_blender
- Only set once the fixed elements of mesh slot
- Use more inline function
The following table shows the performance increase between 2.48, 1st round
and this round of improvement. The test was done with a scene containing
40000 objects, of which 1000 are in the view frustrum approximately. The
object are simple textured cube to make sure the GPU is not the bottleneck.
As some of the rasterizer processing time has moved under culling, I present
the sum of scenegraph(includes culling)+rasterizer time
Scenegraph+rasterizer(ms) 2.48 1st round 3rd round
All objects static, 323.0 86.0 7.2
all visible, 1000 in
the view frustrum
All objects static, 219.0 49.7 N/A(*)
all invisible.
All objects moving, 323.0 105.6 34.7
all visible, 1000 in
the view frustrum
Scene destruction 40min 40min 4s
(*) : this time is not representative because the frame rate was at 60fps.
In that case, the GPU holds down the GE by frame sync. By design, the
overhead of the rasterizer is 0 when the the objects are invisible.
This table shows a global speed up between 9x and 45x compared to 2.48a
for scenegraph, culling and rasterizer overhead. The speed up goes much
higher when objects are invisible.
An additional 2-4x speed up is possible in the scenegraph by upgrading
the Moto library to use Eigen2 BLAS library instead of C++ classes but
the scenegraph is already so fast that it is not a priority right now.
Next speed up in logic: many things to do there...
Realtime modifiers applied on mesh objects will be supported in
the game engine with the following limitations:
- Only real time modifiers are supported (basically all of them!)
- Virtual modifiers resulting from parenting are not supported:
armature, curve, lattice. You can still use these modifiers
(armature is really not recommended) but in non parent mode.
The BGE has it's own parenting capability for armature.
- Modifiers are computed on the host (using blender modifier
stack).
- Modifiers are statically evaluated: any possible time dependency
in the modifiers is not supported (don't know enough about
modifiers to be more specific).
- Modifiers are reevaluated if the underlying mesh is deformed
due to shape action or armature action. Beware that this is
very CPU intensive; modifiers should really be used for static
objects only.
- Physics is still based on the original mesh: if you have a
mirror modifier, the physic shape will be limited to one half
of the resulting object. Therefore, the modifiers should
preferably be used on graphic objects.
- Scripts have no access to the modified mesh.
- Modifiers that are based on objects interaction (boolean,..)
will not be dependent on the objects position in the GE.
What you see in the 3D view is what you get in the GE regardless
on the object position, velocity, etc.
Besides that, the feature is compatible with all the BGE features
that affect meshes: armature action, shape action, relace mesh,
VideoTexture, add object, dupligroup.
Known problems:
- This feature is a bit hacky: the BGE uses the derived mesh draw
functions to display the object. This drawing method is a
bit slow and is not 100% compatible with the BGE. There may
be some problems in multi-texture mode: the multi-texture
coordinates are not sent to the GPU.
Texface and GLSL on the other hand should be fully supported.
- Culling is still based on the extend of the original mesh.
If you have a modifer that extends the size of the mesh,
the object may disappear while still in the view frustrum.
- Derived mesh is not shared between replicas.
The derived mesh is allocated and computed for each object
with modifiers, regardless if they are static replicas.
- Display list are not created on objects with modifiers.
I should be able to fix the above problems before release.
However, the feature is already useful for game development.
Once you are ready to release the game, you can apply the modifiers
to get back display list support and mesh sharing capability.
MSVC, scons, Cmake, makefile updated.
Enjoy
/benoit
* giving compileflags, cc_compileflags and cxx_compileflags to BlenderLib() now actually overrides any other setting (so there's no unclarity when ie. conflicting options are being specified in REL_CFLAGS et al). These are set after either release or debug flags, but before any *_WARN flags (so those stay maintained).
* add cxx_compileflags for GE parts on win32-vc to have better performance.
* NOTE: if platform maintainers (OSX and Linux) could check and do the same for their systems. Not vital, but probably very, very much welcomed by GE users.
the features that are needed to run the game. Compile tested with
scons, make, but not cmake, that seems to have an issue not related
to these changes. The changes include:
* GLSL support in the viewport and game engine, enable in the game
menu in textured draw mode.
* Synced and merged part of the duplicated blender and gameengine/
gameplayer drawing code.
* Further refactoring of game engine drawing code, especially mesh
storage changed a lot.
* Optimizations in game engine armatures to avoid recomputations.
* A python function to get the framerate estimate in game.
* An option take object color into account in materials.
* An option to restrict shadow casters to a lamp's layers.
* Increase from 10 to 18 texture slots for materials, lamps, word.
An extra texture slot shows up once the last slot is used.
* Memory limit for undo, not enabled by default yet because it
needs the .B.blend to be changed.
* Multiple undo for image painting.
* An offset for dupligroups, so not all objects in a group have to
be at the origin.
GLEW
====
Added the GLEW opengl extension library into extern/, always compiled
into Blender now. This is much nicer than doing this kind of extension
management manually, and will be used in the game engine, for GLSL, and
other opengl extensions.
* According to the GLEW website it works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X,
FreeBSD, Irix, and Solaris. There might still be platform specific
issues due to this commit, so let me know and I'll look into it.
* This means also that all extensions will now always be compiled in,
regardless of the glext.h on the platform where compilation happens.
Game Engine
===========
Refactoring of the use of opengl extensions and other drawing code
in the game engine, and cleaning up some hacks related to GLSL
integration. These changes will be merged into trunk too after this.
The game engine graphics demos & apricot level survived my tests,
but this could use some good testing of course.
For users: please test with the options "Generate Display Lists" and
"Vertex Arrays" enabled, these should be the fastest and are supposed
to be "unreliable", but if that's the case that's probably due to bugs
that can be fixed.
* The game engine now also uses GLEW for extensions, replacing the
custom opengl extensions code that was there. Removes a lot of
#ifdef's, but the runtime checks stay of course.
* Removed the WITHOUT_GLEXT environment variable. This was added to
work around a specific bug and only disabled multitexturing anyway.
It might also have caused a slowdown since it was retrieving the
environment variable for every vertex in immediate mode (bug #13680).
* Refactored the code to allow drawing skinned meshes with vertex
arrays too, removing some specific immediate mode drawing functions
for this that only did extra normal calculation. Now it always splits
vertices of flat faces instead.
* Refactored normal recalculation with some minor optimizations,
required for the above change.
* Removed some outdated code behind the __NLA_OLDDEFORM #ifdef.
* Fixed various bugs in setting of multitexture coordinates and vertex
attributes for vertex arrays. These were not being enabled/disabled
correct according to the opengl spec, leading to crashes. Also tangent
attributes used an immediate mode call for vertex arrays, which can't
work.
* Fixed use of uninitialized variable in RAS_TexVert.
* Exporting skinned meshes was doing O(n^2) lookups for vertices and
deform weights, now uses same trick as regular meshes.
[#7113] GE crash pressing as soon as P on 64 bit
Note: glext.h has been removed from the source
If you get errors compiling with it you have 2 options
download/install glext.h (preferred method)
or set WITH_BF_GLEXT=false
If your a user and having problems with game engine try
setting the env var: WITHOUT_GLEXT 1
Kent
+ 'scons blenderplayer' builds blender AND blenderplayer now (tested on Linux
only, but was only linking issue, so should work on other platforms too).
NOTE: I noticed some compileflags for GE specific libs that were left out -
I re-enabled them in the SConscripts, but I'm going to do a test build my-
self now, so if there are problems with them on win32, I probably already
know about them :)
* This commit is all of the rewrite work done on the SCons system. For
documentation see doc/blender-scons.txt and doc/blender-scons-dev.txt.
Also http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SconsRefactoring
contains valuable information, along with what still needs to be done.
- linux, os x and windows compile now.
- files are compiled to BF_INSTALLDIR (see config/(platform)-config.py)
- NOTE: Jean-Luc P will commit sometime during the weekend proper
appit() for OS X. For now, copy the resulting binary to an
existing .app bundle.
- features:
- cleaner structure for better maintenance
- cleaner output during compile
- better handling of build options
- general overall speed increase
- see the wiki for more info
Cygwin, FreeBSD and Solaris systems still need work. For these systems:
1) copy a config/(platform)-config.py to ie. config/cygwin-config.py
2) set the proper defaults for your platform
3) mail me at jesterking at letwory dot net with you configuration. if
you need any modifications to the system, do send a patch, too.
I'll be giving first-aid today and tomorrow, after that it'll be all
regular development work :)
/Nathan
[SCons] Build with Solid as default when enabling the gameengine in the build process
[SCons] Build solid and qhull from the extern directory and link statically against them
That was about it.
There are a few things that needs double checking:
* Makefiles
* Projectfiles
* All the other systems than Linux and Windows on which the build (with scons) has been successfully tested.
* Blender static now links. By default this option is disabled on all
platforms. Simply set the option in config.opts to 'true'.
* Added the following flags to config.opts:
- HOST_CC. This is the C compiler for the host platform. This value is the
same as TARGET_CC when not cross compiling.
- HOST_CXX. This is the C++ compiler for the host platform. This value is
the same as TARGET_CXX when not cross compiling.
- TARGET_CC. This is the C compiler for the target platform.
- TARGET_CXX. This is the C++ compiler for the target platform.
- TARGET_AR. This is the linker command for linking libraries.
- PATH This is the standard search path
All SConscript files have been updated to reflect these changes. Now it's
possible to change only the root SConstruct file, and all compiler specific
variables are passed automatically to all SConscript files. Of course, this
does not apply to makesdna because there the host and target platform is
different from all other libraries.
To pass a variable that applies to all platforms, all we now have to do is
set the correct value in library_env
Note: as usual, to get the latest options in the config.opts file, first
remove your version.
* libraries are now generated in [BUILD_DIR]/lib
* passed the user_options to all libraries now.
This means I could remove a couple of Export/Import lines.
* Changed the order in source/blender/src/SConscript and
source/gameengine/SConscript.
All libraries are now sorted alphabetically. This has no impact on the build
process.
* Windows .exe file now includes the blender icon.
* Builds with game engine on Windows only.
I tried building the game engine on Linux, but I get weird errors when
building with ode. There's a dirty #include path in
Physics/BlOde/OdePhysicsEnvironment.cpp (../ode/src/joint.h). gcc doesn't
like this somehow.
* Other platforms need to add a couple of flags to the SConstruct:
use_sumo, use_ode, solid_include and ode_include
