Setting up -current, Vulkan
Currently in the process of setting up Slackware -current on a spare drive I got
laying around so I can work on some Vulkan stuff in FTE.
It'll result in me probably pushing up some compatibility fixes so that TW 1.2
will look and run more like we intended... not sure. Maybe I won't have to fix
stuff at all this time.
The Intel HD 4600 supposedly supports Vulkan 1.1 according to the MesaMatrix,
so I'll be seeing how well it'll work with it. I don't think Spike has touched
the VK renderer in while or at least I haven't seen any major commits being done
on it. I'll definitely show off how well the FreeCS stuff runs in comparison to
GL as we've got a lot of slowdown thanks to the really, really slow clipped
decals. That said it might be a bit more CPU heavy than we thought but I haven't
come around to doing any serious investigation into it.
Half-Life maps place infodecal entities that project a wad-lump to the nearest
surface plane and align it with the texture scale and rotation - this can get
pretty expensive if you're filling a room with them as they are being drawn and
culled in FTE every frame right now. It'd probably be a bit better to cache that
as in Half-Life those decals in particular are from what I understand purely
static. Anyway that's probably less GPU related but I figured I'd give it a
mention nonetheless
My fans start spinning up when I place about 32 of them, HL by default allows
300 decals to be present by default (and that's just bullet holes and scorch
marks) until they start replacing eachother. There's also some other
optimisations going on like replacing the nearest decal and whatnot. Currently
those were networked because that was emulating GoldSrc behaviour - however I
don't think the effect is worth it at all. I'll be shoving that into the client
game as I'm convinced no one will notice it anyway
-- Marco