dougbinks

dougbinks, 1 year ago to random

@bwrensch I've updated the beta, and there's a hidden option for the .vox exporter in in the Documents/Avoyd/user.cfg config file. This is a text json file and if you search for ConstrainToMagicaVoxelSizeLimitations you can set it to false.

Currently this will produce garbage output if the file size would end up over 4GB, as the ogt_vox.h library I use uses a 32bit buffer size - but I'll fix that later.

dougbinks, 1 month ago to random

Annoying that in Vulkan compute I can't easily get hold of the optimal minimum number of invocations
of a shader to run.

Subgroup functionality gives us the SIMD lane width with subgroupSize (see https://www.khronos.org/blog/vulkan-subgroup-tutorial by @neilhenning ), but as far as I am aware there's no easy way to get the number of subgroups which can run simultaneously.

For many applications this doesn't mater, but in some cases it's really useful to know.

dougbinks, 8 months ago to random

It's interesting that with all the discussions of game engines recently no one mentioned O3DE https://o3de.org/ (CryEngine > Amazon Lumberyard > O3DE).

It's a Linux Foundation Project (via the Open 3D Foundation), and the Github seems fairly active https://github.com/o3de/o3de

I don't know what that means as far as support for the project, though it appears there are non-engineeering staff members.

I don't know of any games which have been released using it though.

dougbinks, 6 days ago to random

It's going to be interesting to see how Windows ARM pans out, and whether gamedevs targeting Windows now have another platform to worry about - considering changing our 'for Windows' info to 'for Windows x64' or something.

dougbinks, 29 days ago to random

I was just looking at zstd project and was surprised at how many files there now are, and how complex building it looks to be.

dougbinks, 27 days ago to random

I mentioned earlier that I'd love a single toggle to turn off Visual Studio C++ auto-formatting my code, but it now appears that I can't even turn it off by toggling lots of options.

Some options only have a choice of how to format, none of which are 'leave alone' and none are what I want.

Getting very tired of formatting everything by hand multiple times as every minor change triggers auto-format to format incorrectly.

dougbinks, 3 days ago to random

A good reason to use colour rather than color in your code is that colour has the same number of letters as both albedo and normal so you can align your code better.

dougbinks, 5 months ago to random

Our payment provider Fastspring has hit us with a $150 hidden charge for 'Risk Screening' despite having used them for over five years.

We're considering moving to BMTMicro or another provider. Anyone have recommendations for a provider which can:

• Be Merchant of Record (i.e. handle local taxes such as VAT etc.).
• Allow us to handle Key generation (preferably via API but upload also OK).
• Provide VAT receipt to customers (our product Avoyd is also for commercial use).

dougbinks, 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago) to random

I've been using Linux since it was first practically available (early 90's), UNIX before that, a variety of other OSs including UNIX derived NeXTSTEP, and I can genuinely say that Windows has many advantages and continues to do so.

Whilst part of the advantage comes from being the primary OS (for games, 96.76% market share on Steam), some comes from its feature set.

Most programs which work continue to do so (I have a 25 year old game I made, for which the installer and game still work).

dougbinks, 2 months ago to random

We're making progress with the GPU path tracer in our Avoyd Voxel Editor, now with decent performance on both AMD and NVIDIA discrete GPUs (I've not yet been able to test Intel).

For now we're disabling spirv-opt in our shader build pipeline due to it causing a >4x hit to performance on older AMD GPUs.

If you own Avoyd then do try out the latest Beta.

https://www.enkisoftware.com/t/6266014494883840

dougbinks, 1 year ago to random

@bwrensch FYI The Avoyd .vox export latest beta will now not produce corrupt files if there is a 32bit overflow & give you an error, plus you can control the model size. So should be better for your needs.

Docs: https://www.avoyd.com/avoyd-voxel-editor-documentation.html#Export

Splitting things up into separate .vox files will take a bit longer since it needs different code.

dougbinks, 3 months ago to random

Some time ago we changed the URL for the images on our website.

Since then we've noticed we get lots of requests for the old URLs. When aggregated these are the most common requests to our site. The requests don't seem to make sense from the perspective of someone browsing an old downloaded html file, as they are out of order & fetched at odd rates.

I presume these are part of an AI training set, so on top of all the harms AI is doing you can add website costs & a slower internet.

dougbinks, 1 month ago to random

Quick test render of clouds imported from https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/57747/blue-marble-clouds (I used the 21600x21600 png) as a heightmap with height 64, using the Cloud: white heavy material. Rendered from above in Avoyd Voxel Editor.

Useful for creating skies for renders, image use policy on their site is 'freely available for re-publication or re-use, including commercial purposes'.

#Avoyd #Voxel

dougbinks, 4 months ago to GraphicsProgramming

My Avoyd GPU path tracer is getting closer to release. Recently I used my enkiTS tasking system to create the GPU resources so I could display a progress bar.

For models which filled the GPU device local memory & spilled to CPU host memory this caused a device lost error.

I had made the shader + pipeline creation parallel to buffer creation. Forcing shader + pipeline first fixed this. I'm guessing that running out of device memory prior to pipeline creation isn't a good idea.

#Vulkan #Voxel

dougbinks, 3 months ago to random

As a dyslexic the subject:

"Your bank account will be
debited soon"

reads like:

"Your bank account will be
deleted soon"

thus inducing a moment of panic pretty much every month before both recollection of prior panics and the eventual recognition of the actual word kick in.

I guess 'delete' has a higher priority than 'debit' in my recognition filters, makes sense.

dougbinks, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago) to random

I recently did some work on improving the import/export of emissive materials in Avoyd to/from @ephtracy's .vox format and whilst doing so saw this interesting pattern during rendering.

I've not tried to reverse engineer the MagicaVoxel rendering (Avoyd uses standard unidirectional path tracing), but this has me intrigued as to the algorithm and whether it's been written about anywhere.

Note: voxel emission increases by a factor of 10 each voxel from top (darkest) to bottom (brightest).

dougbinks, 3 days ago to random

Optimizing compute output buffer write pattern. What could go wrong?

#Avoyd #InterestingButWrong

dougbinks, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Follow up blog post to my query about what payment providers people use after ours decided to charge a hidden fee, talking about our transition to @itchio

Perhaps we should have called this "So long, and thanks for all the phish".

https://www.enkisoftware.com/devlogpost-20231222-1-Moving-from-FastSpring-to-Itch.io-as-a-Payment-Provider

#Itch_Io #IndieDev #IndieGameDev

dougbinks, 1 month ago to random

I really wish there is a way to turn off auto-formatting with one click in Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 2022 has so many options that I'm struggling to turn them all off, and since I work on multiple projects all with different coding standards I'd rather it was just off entirely.

dougbinks, 10 days ago to random

I should probably invert my normal research approach for fast algorithms from.

1. I search the internet for information.
2. I read @rygorous' blog.

This time it's for fast blurs.

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/fast-blurs-2/

dougbinks, 10 days ago to Minecraft

Added @troy_s's AgX tone mapping to Avoyd Voxel Editor, based on @benjamin's code.

This is an initial implementation and there may be some issues, but the beta is available for those who have access.

#Voxel #Avoyd #Minecraft #AgX

AgX tone mapping On, Normal Preset. Avoyd Voxel Editor with the Minecraft map Drehmal imported and rendered. The 3D Viewport shows a view over a small Japanese style village with a harbour harbour, surrounded by cherry trees.
AgX tone mapping On, Golden preset. Avoyd Voxel Editor with the Minecraft map Drehmal imported and rendered. The 3D Viewport shows a view over a small Japanese style village with a harbour harbour, surrounded by cherry trees.
AgX tone mapping On, Punchy preset. Avoyd Voxel Editor with the Minecraft map Drehmal imported and rendered. The 3D Viewport shows a view over a small Japanese style village with a harbour harbour, surrounded by cherry trees.

dougbinks, 2 months ago to Minecraft

Took a break from improvements to the GPU path tracer to test making a stylized volcanic eruption using the Minecraft map the Continent of Lisrina by Dannypan.

#Avoyd #Voxel #Render #Minecraft #VoxelEditor

dougbinks, 3 months ago to random

I'm converting the non-full voxel path tracer from CPU to GPU (the full voxel case already works), and have reached the point where I have pixels on the screen.

Lots of debugging to do to get from the first image to the second!

The Avoyd Voxel Editor with a path traced render on the CPU of a Camper van. The render has transparent windows, metallic reflections on the mirrors and hubcaps, and emissive lights.

dougbinks, 4 months ago to random

Early testing on users PCs of Avoyd's Vulkan GPU path tracer is showing a roughly 10x slower performance on AMD than on a comparable NVIDIA GPU.

It seems @gpuopen's Radeon GPU Profiler doesn't support the latest AMD GPU I have (R9 Nano, GCN 3).

Does anyone know if there is an AMD dev support cloud access program or similar I could test on? Meanwhile I'll see if the Radeon GPU Analyzer can help.

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@dougbinks/111766243276611263

dougbinks, 1 month ago to random

England renewables:

"More land is now taken up by golf courses than solar farms"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/09/england-could-produce-13-times-more-renewable-energy-using-less-than-3-of-land-analysis