The Forge is a cross-platform rendering framework supporting
PC
Windows 10
with DirectX 12 / Vulkan 1.1
with DirectX Ray Tracing API
DirectX 11 Fallback Layer for older Windows paltforms
Linux Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Vulkan 1.1 and RTX Ray Tracing API
Android Pie or higher with
Vulkan 1.1
OpenGL ES 2.0 fallback for large scale business application frameworks
macOS / iOS / iPad OS with Metal 2.2, Intel and Apple processor support
Quest 2 using Vulkan 1.1
XBOX One / XBOX One X / XBOX Series S/X *
PS4 / PS4 Pro *
PS5 *
Switch using Vulkan 1.1 *
*(only available for accredited developers on request)
Particularly, the graphics layer of The Forge supports cross-platform
Descriptor management. A description is on this Wikipage
Multi-threaded and asynchronous resource loading
Shader reflection
Multi-threaded command buffer generation
The Forge can be used to provide the rendering layer for custom next-gen game engines. It is also meant to provide building blocks to write your own game engine. It is like a "lego" set that allows you to use pieces to build a game engine quickly. The "lego" High-Level Features supported on all platforms are at the moment:
Resource Loader as shown in 10_PixelProjectedReflections, capable to load textures, buffers and geometry data asynchronously
Lua Scripting System - currently used for automatic testing and in 06_Playground to load models and textures and animate the camera and in several other unit tests to cycle through the options they offer during automatic testing.
Cross-platform FileSystem C API, supporting disk-based files, memory streams, and files in zip archives
UI system based on Dear imGui extended for touch input devices
Shader Translator using a superset of HLSL as the shader language, called The Forge Shading Language. There is a Wiki page on The Forge Shading Language
Various implementations of high-end Graphics Effects as shown in the unit tests below
Please find a link and credits for all open-source packages used at the end of this readme.
Release 1.52 - April 29th, 2022 - C Code Hot Reloading Unit Test | Visibility Buffer OIT | Pre-Computed DLUT Test | Unified Window and Resolution control | Android Vulkan Validation Layer | CPU Features | Upgraded Vulkan and DX GPU allocator | macOS / iOS improvements | Double precision Math Library | Impoved Input System with HID support
We are always looking for more graphics / engine programmers. We are also specifically looking for a consultant who can help us to scale up our hardware testing environment.
The following list of changes is not fully representative of all the improvements we made, so it is just a selection:
C Code Hot Reloading Unit Test - This unit test showcases an implementation of code hot reloading in C, we've used and adapted the following GitHub library
19_CodeHotReload_Main: generates the executable. All code in this project can't be hot-reloaded. This is the project you should set as startup project when running the program form an IDE.
19a_CodeHotReload_Game: for development platforms Windows/MacOS/Linux generates a dynamic library that is loaded by the Main project in runtime, when the dynamic library changes the Main program reloads the new code. For Android/IOS/Quest/Consoles this project is compiled and linked statically.
How to use it: While the Main project is running open 19_CodeHotReload_Game.cpp and perform some change, there are lines marked with TRY_CODE_RELOAD to make easy changes. Once the file is saved, you can rebuild the project and see the changes happen automatically.
Windows/Linux: Click on the UI "RebuildGame" button.
MacOS: Command+B on XCode to rebuild.
Note: In this implementation we can't call any functions from The Forge from the HotReloadable project (19a_CodeHotReload_Game), this is because we are compiling OS and Renderer as static libraries and linking them directly to the exe. Ideally these projects should be compiled as dynamic libraries in order to expose their functionality to the exe and hot reloadable dll. The reason we didn't implement it in this way is because all our other projects are already setup to use static libraries.
Visibility Buffer Order-Independent Transparency - we added OIT by utilizing a per-pixel linked list to a Visibility Buffer (VB) rendering architecture. In case of Deferred Shading (DS), the per-pixel linked list holds per-pixel data. In case of VB it only holds the triangle index data. You can switch between DS and VB in this example. The VB version occupies substantially less memory and is faster. With memory bandwidth being the biggest challenge in graphics programming, this is not unexpected. Most people by now adopted the idea of VB in one or two ways but it doesn't hurt to show another advantage of the architecture.
Linux 1080p resolution
macOS 3200x1760 resolution
PS4 1080p resolution
PS5 4k resolution
Windows 10 1080p resolution
XBOX One (original) 1080p resolution
Pre-Computed DLUT Test - this test implements pre-computing volume transmittance in Blender or Houdini for 6 directions and shading clouds/smoke based on the following tweets:
In this repository is a "dlut.blend" file that contains a minimal volumetric render setup. In order to generate DLUT image do the following steps:
Set the viewport shading to "Rendered"
Select the "Sun" object
Set the X rotation to 0 degrees
Press F12 to render the image and wait for a few minutes until it's done
Save the rendered image to "dlut_0.png"
Repeat steps 3-5 for 90, 180 and 270 degrees and save "dlut_90.png", "dlut_180.png" and "dlut_270.png"
Run the "combine_dlut.py" Python script or manually combine rendered images in your image editor of choice, each color channel should contain the red channel from the corresponding "dlut_*.png" image multiplied by the alpha channel of the same image. For example, green channel should contain the red channel from "dlut_90.png" multiplied by the alpha channel of "dlut_90.png"
Experiment and implement further ideas from the article above. Setting up a Mantaflow simulation in Blender and exporting animated smoke and simulation attributes like temperature can yield interesting results!
Resulting DLUT image should look like this:
The example program running on Android:
Window Management - all the platforms that support the concept of having a windowed application have now a base file named {Platform}Window.cpp. There is now a common UI element that offers -if supported- multi-monitor support and various window settings. There are also LUA scripts that test the functionality in our Jenkins setup.
Android Vulkan Validation layers: we added the validation layer from Khronos GitHub repo as they have stopped shipping the layer in the NDK.
You can find them in ThirdParty/OpenSource/AndroidVulkanValidationLayers
CPU / GPU Features - we integrated the following library to test CPU features during start-up. Now you will see a lot more information about the CPU in the upper left corner of a window.
This library is the stepping stone of utilizing more CPU instrinsics on various platforms. You can see its results in the screenshots above, showing the name of the CPU, the supported instruction set. We also show now the GPU name and the driver version that the GPU uses.
Upgraded Vulkan and DX Allocators: following the updates to these open-source libraries on GitHub we upgraded our code base accordingly.
macOS / iOS - while working with TF on various projects, we bring back improvements and lessons learned from those projects. You will find numerous macOS / iOS improvements in this release.
For one of the business applications we worked on, we needed double precision Math. We extended the math library now accordingly with support.
We also improved the input system with HID support, which is an on-going effort. So better controller support on more platforms ...
Windows 7 - better Windows 7 support with DX11 and Vulkan ... still a bug in the Vulkan run-time with sRGB ...
We upgraded the 06_MaterialPlayground with shadows:
Retired unit test: we are going to retire many unit tests now because our automated testing cycle takes too long and heats up the "engine" room (see above passage on us looking for an consultant to scale up our testing environment). Today we retire:
02_Compute
05_FontRendering
13_UserInterface - we might create a much more advanced one for tools development in the future
16a_SphereTracing
32_Windows - not necessary anymore with every unit test now offering windows management
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