Thursday 4 April 2013

There is a light and it never goes out

I've not really done much on Offender over the last couple of months, instead I've been playing a lot - Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Crysis, Mass Effect 3 and a bit of Fallout: New Vegas. Kind of interesting that the more time I spend working with OpenGL the more I look at these games and think "how would I do that?"

I've started putting lighting into my terrain. For the uninitiated, 3D APIs generally use three types of lighting. Ambient lighting is applied evenly to all surfaces, modelling light that scatters and bounces all over the scene. Diffuse lighting takes a direct path from the source, but scatters when it hits a surface, so surfaces facing the source appear brighter no matter where the viewer is. Finally specular lighting reflects off shiny surfaces, creating highlights at points which reflect light back to the viewer. Fixed-function pipelines typically provided all of these, these days they all need to be implemented with shaders.

For my terrain I'm just using ambient and diffuse lighting. Specular highlights are more complex than the other two, and grass and rocks generally aren't all that shiny so it's not really necessary. Water is shiny, but I was thinking of doing that as a separate entity to the terrain with its own shader. With the default per-vertex Gouraud shading specular highlights can look a bit iffy - you really need Phong shading, but that's per-pixel so it inflicts a lot of computation on the fragment shader. Having said this, bump-mapping might be worth doing and that's also per-pixel - but that's one for later methinks.

Also most of the sample shaders I've seen convert everything into eye coordinates (i.e. relative to the viewer), whereas I've just left everything in world coordinates (i.e. relative to the world origin). This saves multiplying everything by the view matrix, and as ambient and diffuse lighting are viewer-independent it shouldn't make any difference. With the only light source being the sun at a fixed infinity, I've been able to get away with really simple shaders

However the lighting has emphasised a problem with my terrain generation, as there are prominent "ripples" across the surfaces. That'd probably look great on sand dunes, not so good on grass and rocks. This is almost certainly an effect of using an LCG for random number generation, though I've not done the maths to try and explain it properly - something to do with serial correlation I guess?

The reason I'm using an LCG is that it's fast, and I'm reluctant to move to a better algorithm if it's going to be prohibitively slow. I experimented with a CRC32 to get rid of those ripples, it looked a bit better but symmetrical - again there's probably a good mathematical reason for this. However combining an LCG and CRC produced decent results.

LCG-based terrain. See those ripples.CRC-based terrain. Strangely
symmetrical (and a bit ripply)
LCG/CRC combo. Much better.
To see if moving away from an LCG made terrain generation noticeably slower I added some crude timing info to my debug build. The total time for calculating the vertices alone went from about 5ms per tile (pictured terrain is 3x3 tiles) with just an LCG to around 50ms with the LCG/CRC hybrid, a 10x increase! That kinda vindicates my decision to go with an LCG in the first place. Switching to the release build it took about 5ms for LCG/CRC vertixes. Timing the rest of the initialisation for comparison, the only other significant block was the bit which copies data to OpenGL buffers at around 8ms. So very approximately the vertex generation with LCG/CRC is a third of the time taken to generate the tile, and the total time for the tile is around 16ms - a frame at 60Hz. I can live with that.

Incidentally, I made a few discoveries while doing this. Extracting textures from files takes a long time - ~220ms for 3 textures, about the same in release and debug. I was re-loading the same textures every time I generated a tile when I should be sharing the textures, so fairly obvious room for improvement there. I also found that if I invoked the release build from outside Visual Studio the textures didn't load. Some path issue I guess? I really must learn to put in helpful error messages rather than flippant remarks or swear words.

My next step was going to be expanding the area by generating terrain on-the-fly. Given that it's taking around a frame to generate a tile and the CPU has plenty of other things to be doing, I'd need split the generation across multiple frames in any spare time remaining before the end of frame. Unfortunately OpenGL's syncing options are fairly limited, so it'd be best done in a separate thread... and I really don't want to go multi-threaded yet, because threads are evil. Honestly, I'm still not great at C++ and having enough trouble debugging strange behaviour without threads introducing a bunch of concurrency issues and non-deterministic behaviour. So I'm going to park this idea until version 2.0. For now I'll either stick with a load of terrain generated at initialisation, or create some height maps.

Speaking of strange behaviour, I noticed that at certain points the player object would start to vibrate violently on screen. I realised it was actually the camera vibrating, it's just that the player is the only thing close to the camera, and the cause was numerical instability in my matrix inverse. That was solved by reordering the rows in the matrix, such that the element the algorithm pivots on is the one with the largest absolute value. Ultimately it was a simple fix, but it was an interesting problem as it illustrated the practical implications of a mathematical phenomenon. I chose to procrastinate on putting this pivoting in, so it just goes to show that taking shortcuts comes back to bite you in the long run so you're better off doing things properly in the first place.

Next up, time to divert my attention back to the player object as it seems faintly ridiculous to have vast swathes of detailed, accurately lit terrain with nothing but a matte purple wedge cruising over it.

No comments:

Post a Comment