Development Log

It seems that this devlog is updated primarily on weekend. We are busy with development, support and new demos production on other days, sorry.

Recent changes:

• Minimization of CPU cache misses.
• DIP speed increase up to 550 kDIP/s (OpenGL) and 360 kDIP/s (Direct3D9).
• GUI improvements (upgrade.py script should be used for migration).
• System of sectors and portals.
• Reduction of allocation count per frame.
• Some changes in materials concerning alpha testing.
• ASCII Scene Export (ASE) format support.
• Wavefront OBJ (OBJ) format support.
• World, parent and local transformations of objects in UnigineEditor.

Minimization of CPU cache misses was a real headache for Frustum (if someone still doesn't know him, it's our lead developer, Alexander Zaprjagaev) but the juice was worth the squeeze, now we have a noticeable performance improvement.

Indoor system (sectors, portals and occluders):

Last time we forgot to show a screenshot regarding immovable dynamic lights optimization, you can see it below. There are 40 (sic!) dynamic lights (omni directional with enabled shadows) in the scene - 6.400.000 polygones without the optimization, only 194.000 polygones with it. Not bad, huh?

By the way, the screenshot is taken from our new large-scale demo, which will be ready only in 5-6 months, but it will be very interesting surprise. Sorry for the strange perspective, we just don't want to reveal the secret before time.

Today is 3rd December, "3D day". Our congratulations to everyone who is engaged in 3D industry - artists and graphics programmers. We hope that working in exciting 3D virtual worlds is as fun for you, as it is for us.

Well, let's get back to the news. Unigine now supports COLLADA 1.4, therefore one could easily use 3ds Max, Maya, Blender, SOFTIMAGE|XSI, LightWave and any 3D editor, which can export into COLLADA format (DAE), within Unigine art pipeline.

List of changes:

• Rotation of PRT light using new transformation system.
• Better directory functions.
• Improved ImageDialog with support of per-channel view.
• RichText renamed to FontRich.
• Redesigned FileDialog.
• Visualization of overloaded parameters for material hierarchy, support of resetting to parent values.
• Fixed mipmaps generator.
• Fixed blending for transparent materials.
• AmbientMapper now works with high-poly models.
• Support of rectangular textures in NormalCombiner.
• Support of COLLADA 1.4.
• Preliminary refactoring for terrain shaders.
• Optimizations for immovable dynamic lights.
• Mesh interaction tracing speedup.

Some of the recent changes could be easily noticed by customers because we have changed the look of dialog windows and re-designed some parts of default GUI skin. Our main concern was easy file manipulations for artists so we've changed layout and functionality of FileDialog: now it has tabs and preview:

There are more UI improvements to come, they will be available in 3-4 weeks.

Now we have clear way towards physics refactoring and integration.

Unigine reference manual has been filling with chapters about UnigineScript built-in library for a pair of weeks. We must say that this means a heap of work since UnigineScript has way too rich library, there are more than 1000 functions. Gosh, all of them need to be documented properly!

This week changes:

• Automatic batching of objects for rendering.
• ObjectBillboard (oriented in parallel with camera plane or rotate around Z axis, arbitrary rotation center offset) with support of alpha-testing, emission, normal and specular mapping.
• Memory allocations optimization.
• Smart rendering into deferred buffer for particles and transparent objects.
• Height-fading volume fog.
• Changing of blending for detail material.
• Two speeds of camera movement in UnigineEditor - normal and fast (with SHIFT) ones.
• Displaying of video memory used for meshes and textures.
• Minor bugfixes and improvements.

We've forgotten to mention, ATI Catalyst 6.10 and 6.11 really solved win32/OpenGL crashes, now everything is fine.

Last two weeks brought an amazing performance improvement since it was time of very close work with various tools for performance analysis, a bottlenecks hunting season. We have to say that NVPerfSDK is a really good tool for that case, as you can see on the screenshot there are some more performance counters in our profiler, which are available along with instrumental driver from NVIDIA. It would be great if ATI (sorry, AMD - we still can't get used to this weird names like ati.amd.com) make their tools as easy-to-integrate as NVIDIA ones.

Recent changes:

• Noticeable improvement of overall performance.
• Huge increase of DIP speed from 60-80k to 440k/s (OpenGL) and 380k/s (Direct3D9).
• Massive shaders refactoring.
• Half float data storage format for meshes.
• OpenGL pseudo-instancing of geometry drawing.
• SystemProfiler wrapper for all performance tools like NVPerfSDK (being used with instrumental driver the profiler outputs statistics in runtime).
• Manager refactoring (now it handles only textures and all types of meshes).
• Introduced new objects:
  • ObjectMeshGui (3D GUI on an arbitrary curved surface)
  • MeshDynamic (generated on-the-fly from C++ part)
  • ObjectVolumeBox
  • ObjectVolumeSphere
  • ObjectVolumeOmni
  • ObjectVolumeProj
  • WorldOccluder (software occluder)

And a bunch of minor ones:

• Color sets for particle systems replaced by an attenuation texture (a horizontal gradient) with support of vertical texture transformations.
• GridBox improvement.
• Cloning of nodes in editor (using SHIFT+move).
• runFunction() construction for UnigineScript function calls from C++.
• loadUI/deleteUI functions replaced by unified for engine.gui and ObjectGui pair: addUserInrerface/removeUserInterface.

As you can see, there are a lot of visual effects added. A family of teapots walking through volume fog:

It turns out that we have too many objects - icons can be hardly squizzed into the tool bar, we are thinking about a new layout because there are more to come. New volumetric lights:

We suppose that the hottest thing of the month is NVIDIA G80, we want at least one, but it's hard to get for the moment. CUDA seems to be interesting also, we're waiting for NVIDIA's approval of our application for access to the SDK.

We are starting our public development log in order to give more information regarding Unigine v0.4. Here you will find our concerns, achievements and some exclusive screenshots from internal tech-demos. The devlog will be updated each 1-2 weeks, we suppose. You can subscribe to our RSS feed to track new entries. Well, let's start!

Changes for the last week:

• ObjectGUI.
• GUI rendering optimization.
• Rendering optimization of particle systems.
• Alpha-testing bugfix on NVIDIA, driver problems.
• Visualization of textures, which were failed to load.
• Warnings regarding textures of non-standart size (power of 2).
• Half-float data support by Mathlib.
• Fresnel refraction improvements.
• Support of logarithmic scales in material editor.
• Expandable ranges for parameters in material editor.

Water looks even better than before, especially the coastline. It's a pity that we couldn't place screenshots in public domain because they contain test environment, which is subjected to NDA with our customers. Anyway we will add a lot of water into our forthcoming big demo, you'll see it later.

ObjectGUI looks very cool but sometimes we are afraid of its flexibility ourselves - for example, we've launched the world editor inside the ObjectGUI placed in 3D virtual world. A new experimental feature is GUI on an arbitrary curved surface, you can see it on the screenshot, it's really wicked.

Guys from NVIDIA has finally fixed a minor bug in their drivers, which was submitted by Frustum a long time ago (there are 2 more unfixed bugs). We are still waiting for official release of Catalyst 6.10 from ATI, which will fix win32/OpenGL crashes with Unigine.

That's all for now, stay tuned.