Teaser Fridays and Roadmap talks

Here’s another Vulkan teaser :slight_smile: Updated to Mojave yesterday which unlocked more debugging tools for Metal / MoltvenVK shaders. I can now step through a piece of shader code for a specific pixel to actually see what goes on with the values, it’s pretty wild!

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That’s rad! Will it be possible to debug shaders like this with Defold in the future?

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Yes, very likely! Xcode for Apple products and renderdoc for all other :slight_smile:

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There’s also https://spector.babylonjs.com/

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Impressive! :star_struck:

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We had an exploration day today; I decided to try out adding ‘multiple rendertarget’ support to our render scripts, and here is the result:

Basically, you could specify the number of textures per rendertarget you would like to attach and then set each output with the gl_FragData[n] call. It’s useful for stuff like deferred rendering and various post-processing implementations such as temporal antialiasing, where you don’t want to render the objects several times to pack the scene data…

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Awesome!

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Defold 3D, cool!

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gpgs
Still no ETA but work in progress.

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Here’s another little thing in progress (DEF-1184 Interleavable tilemap layers)
Should land in the next release.

This features rendering more similar to sprites, enables better sorting and batching of regions and other tilemaps. E.g. in the video below, there are two tilemaps and a sprite. The layers behind the hero are merged into one draw call, and the (single) layer in front of the hero is another draw call. Total draw calls 3. Previously it would have been at least 4 draw calls, depending on the width/height of the tilemaps (the region size is still 32x32 tiles, and each region was previously batched separately)

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Awesome :space_invader::clap:

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Epic update! :+1:

Maybe you can do that, too… -> "Visible" and "Z" control via Tilemap API
:hugs:

I’ll look into it for sure!

What is the use case for setting Z of a layer at runtime?

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Next step for tilemaps must be ability to assign custom convexshape for particular tile.
What is generated from opaque pixels is good for nothing (unless it’s just rectangles).

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Yes, the tile collisions can definitely be improved.

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I was working on a sandbox game.
There’s a change of day and night in the game.

GIF1

I planned to make the top layer of “Night” with tiles of certain transparency and red shade. When night fell, I planned to turn on this layer and change the alpha through “tilemap.set_constant”. Of course, “tilemap.set_constant” refers to the whole tilemap, but I would create several layers with pre-defined transparency, so I asked you to at least turn the layer on/off or change the Z so that you can hide the layer.

In short, I had to create a separate “tilemap” light1, see the picture.

image
The performance has been decreasing significantly.
You can put a lot of things into additional layers:

  1. Night-day (alpha layers)
  2. Special full screen effects.
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very early tease…

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Is that polygonal sprites? That’s super cool! Congrats! :heart:

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Will you support the latest Spine features?

Which features do you need?