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(Various game updates returning soon.)

Other stuff:

 We try to get at least a little open source out of every Humble
 Bundle. Sometimes it's epic--like a big pile of games--and sometimes
 it's bits and pieces, like the engine underneath Hammerfight.

 It's something we push for.

 This time the big winner was Shank, which spawned several new open source
 tools.


 * MojoShader: now with Effects!

 MojoShader is at http://icculus.org/mojoshader/ ...

 Shank uses HLSL shaders, which isn't unusual, and wraps these shaders
 in Microsoft's Effects Framework files, which is not unusual either. The
 usual answer here, for non-Windows platforms, is to point Nvidia's Cg at it.

 Cg is sort of awful to work with for several reasons.

 My personal gripes about the library aside, Cg can parse Effect files in
 source code form, but not the compiled versions that Microsoft's fxc.exe can
 spit out. This isn't unreasonable in itself: the compiled file format isn't
 officially documented, and a good portion of it is just blocks of Direct3D
 shader bytecode anyhow, which Cg doesn't grok at all, because they wouldn't
 make much sense to care about on, say, Linux. Unless you're me, then you
 care about them a lot.

 Naturally, most Windows games that use Effects ship them precompiled with the
 offline shader compiler; why shouldn't they? It's faster, smaller, more
 locked-down, and removes the need to compile a bunch of shaders on
 every gamer's machine for crying out loud.

 Since MojoShader already deals with shader bytecode, turning it into GLSL
 or whatever on the fly, it made sense to extend the library to support
 compiled Effects, too. How hard could that be, anyhow?

 Turns out: pretty hard. It took some time to reverse engineer the file
 format, and led to an awful discovery: Effect files can have what are called
 "preshaders," which are programs that run on the CPU to remove redundant
 work from the shaders handed to the GPU. This turns out to be a totally
 different virtual machine from the shaders themselves, with different
 opcodes. Also: you have to write the code to run those opcodes yourself.

 That being said, that all works now, which is pretty hot.

 MojoShader still has some work to be done to fully support Effects...right
 now it parses them pretty well, but you still have to do a lot of work in the
 app itself. Eventually, we'll add a more formal API to handle the appropriate
 OpenGL state changes, leaving the app to just say "start pass X of
 technique Y in Effect Z," but all the hard, undocumented stuff is in there,
 and Shank is using it right now.


 * TheoraPlay

 Shank uses Scaleform for a lot of the game's UI: the menus, the HUD, and,
 notably: the cut scenes. "Scaleform Video," as it is called, is not actually
 owned by Scaleform; it's a codec licensed from a company called CRI, and
 unlike the rest of the library, the video code has not been ported to Linux,
 which made it a non-starter for a Humble Bundle title.

 We had no choice but to rip it out. We talked about reencoding the movies to
 Bink, but decided it was silly to spend money on that when Ogg Theora
 appears to be a fine video format and we were going to have to write a lot
 of code to make the game think it was still talking to Scaleform Video
 anyhow.

 Plus, anyone that's used libvorbisfile knows that dropping Vorbis support
 into a project is dirt simple, so how hard could Theora be...right?

 Turns out there isn't an equivalent to libvorbisfile! You have to get
 down and dirty all the way to the Ogg bitstream level...packets, pages,
 and yes, even Vorbis decoding without the elegance of a single ov_read()
 call.

 Since I had to write all that integration code anyhow, I abstracted it into
 a simple API for other apps to use.

 I call it "TheoraPlay" ... http://icculus.org/theoraplay/

 The benefits of this library are:
  - It's simple to use.
  - You don't need to know anything about Ogg Theora to pull video
  and audio out of an .ogv file.
  - It decodes on a background thread, behind the scenes, so you can get a
  performance boost on multicore CPUs.
  - It supports output in various video formats (YV12, IYUV, RGB, RGBA).
  - It can decode from a filename, or from an i/o callback you provide.
  - It's one .c source file and two .h headers that you drop right into
  your project (plus libogg, libvorbis, and libtheora).
  - It's zlib-licensed, which is even more liberal than the Theora license!

 Once all the heavy lifting to write TheoraPlay was done, the actual
 integration into Shank was quite pleasant. It's a few more steps than
 libvorbisfile (because streaming video+audio is harder than audio by itself),
 but it's pretty pleasant to use.


 * MojoDDS

 Shank isn't the first game to use .DDS files (which, strictly speaking,
 means "DirectDraw Surface" even though they're often used with Direct3D),
 but it was the first time I had run into them.

 DDS files are useful for two reasons: they care about DXTC (or what OpenGL
 calls "S3TC") compression, and they care about mipmaps, so they can often
 be a better answer than something more common, like a .jpg or .png file.
 The format is actually well-documented by Microsoft, but I couldn't find a
 decent drop-in piece of code to handle DDS files, so I cobbled something
 together myself.

 I call it "MojoDDS" ... http://icculus.org/mojodds/

 This library is just a fragment of what I want it to be at the moment; it
 kind of stumbles through a DDS file and spits out the pertinent bits, but
 I'd really like this to much more feature rich: "here's a buffer,
 figure out what it is, and load all its mipmaps into a texture," or maybe
 "give me an RGBA version of this thing," or "do the right thing if this
 system doesn't have S3TC support," which is sadly still a desirable
 attribute in the patent-adverse world of Linux GPU drivers.


 MojoShader, TheoraPlay, and MojoDDS are all zlib-licensed, which means you
 can do almost anything you want with them, including drop them wholesale
 into your commercial, closed-source project.

 Thanks to Jamie Cheng from Klei Entertainment, who was very patient while
 I built big pieces of tech for Shank! Happy new year!

--ryan.


When this .plan was written: 2012-01-02 03:11:15
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