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I'm working on a VR version - early alpha


cabalistic

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I know, the engine is entirely CPU-bound, in large part due to it being effectively single-threaded. That's why I added threading in the first place, and it helped quite a bit. I might try to do more; but for now getting GUI usable takes priority.

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Respect.

What version is your work based on?

We have unlocked fps, rudimentary FBO, buggy unfinished threaded game tics in source svn.

Regarding low end PC's: I think 90 tics per second could be too taxing in some places.

Try the spider cavern in NHAT for example.

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2.05.

I would have developed against svn, but without compatible assets, that wasn't possible :)

 

So, the threaded work you've done, is it easily adaptable to other parts of the engine? Such as physics running on it's own thread, sound etc?

No, I effectively just "restored" the threading of frontend and backend, as was originally intended in the Doom3 engine. Anything else will have to be investigated separately. I also wouldn't necessarily look at adding more threads dedicated to a specific purpose, but rather looking for parallelisation with the help of worker threads. E.g. spreading physics calculations on multiple cores. Intel's threading building blocks library would be a good choice, provided one can identify places where this kind of parallelisation works.

I originally tried it that way with certain parts of the frontend renderer, similar to how it's done in the Doom 3 BFG edition. But unfortunately I hit a few roadblocks, so I postponed that approach for a later reinvestigation.

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I know, the engine is entirely CPU-bound, in large part due to it being effectively single-threaded. That's why I added threading in the first place, and it helped quite a bit. I might try to do more; but for now getting GUI usable takes priority.

 

Adding optimised assets will help a lot too, but that will take time. Or maybe someone will make VR-focused missions, that would be interesting to see.

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The threading work? Sure, although I'd say let's take the current alpha build for a few more test runs first, to make sure I didn't miss any potential race conditions... :)

 

The VR portion I'd say let's keep it separated for now as it's really just an experiment.

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The threading work? Sure, although I'd say let's take the current alpha build for a few more test runs first, to make sure I didn't miss any potential race conditions... :)

One thing I failed on was disappearing dynamic models (e.g. guards) in the frobable area - did you get that right?

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I just played with the training mission a bit, picked stuff up, stole the key from the guard, knocked a guard down and picked up his body. Nothing was disappearing, all seemed fine. I found two other problems though:

- Fullscreen is borked. Might have something to do with the additional OpenGL context I'm creating. You'll need to run the build in windowed mode for now.

- There is some issue with lighting and shadows with some flickering that isn't there in the base 2.05 build. Not sure if this is related to the threading, but there's definitely something wrong.

 

Oh, also I noticed that I accidentally put VR mode to disabled by default. So if you actually want to test the VR output, you'll ned to set vr_enable to 1 in your autoexec.cfg.

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Swell news. My microwave laptop could see the other thread being used as a good performance hike.

 

Wasn't aware TDM runs on an older version of Doom 3.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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Cool stuff.

 

Not that I'm a expert in this area but I've read that Mutex performance is pathological on Windows:

 

https://www.arangodb.com/2015/02/comparing-atomic-mutex-rwlocks/

 

http://demin.ws/blog/english/2012/05/05/atomic-spinlock-mutex/

 

Did you try using Atomics instead?

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Cool stuff.

 

Not that I'm a expert in this area but I've read that Mutex performance is pathological on Windows:

 

https://www.arangodb.com/2015/02/comparing-atomic-mutex-rwlocks/

 

http://demin.ws/blog/english/2012/05/05/atomic-spinlock-mutex/

 

Did you try using Atomics instead?

Probably won't be much difference here because it's only waiting once per frame per thread.

I couldn't build the vr version quickly due to missing DXSDK that 2.05 required and 2.06 does not.

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@Duzenko:

 

The commit log is missing some events apparently. Here is one of interest:

 

 

https://github.com/fholger/thedarkmodvr/commit/ea93ed997be838f283c3b59e83c9dfaa95625da8

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Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I haven't had time to build my own but I tried both v1 and v1.1 and they both produce some visual artifacts,

random black tris around animating objects (etc). Still, better than the whole AI flickering when you get up close.

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Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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