Friday Facts #230 - Engine modernisation

[milo christiansen]

Please don't split the renderer. This just causes either more work for you or one renderer to be favored while the other runs bad and/or with bugs.
Please. think about OpenGL 4.5 only or Vulkan.

I'll second this. There is no reason to support DX when OpenGL works fine. Vulkan may be a bridge too far right now, as it isn't really supported as well as it should be everywhere, but newer versions of OGL are pretty close to Vulkan in a lot of ways anyway.

[wvlad]

Each Friday I check news to see what's going on with the belts compression issue because it's the only really critical game-breaking thing for me but there is only a decorative change again
I imagine what would it be like if I migrate my map to 0.16 earlier, luckily it's only like 3 weeks of waiting already.

[Jap2.0]

How much should we be expecting by way of optimization (ex. less lag when using nukes) and new special effects?

Please don't split the renderer. This just causes either more work for you or one renderer to be favored while the other runs bad and/or with bugs.
Please. think about OpenGL 4.5 only or Vulkan.

You realize that the renderer has been split for a long time? Also that only using OGL 4.5 or Vulkan will prevent many people with old hardware or software from playing?

Does the new engine affects system requirements at all?

I doubt it will change them much - it'll probably add and drop support for various things (they said they wanted more compatibility but they are using newer versions of some software).

As a programmer, I could never get on with Allegro. It's history is older than SDL (I believe, I can't be bothered to Google) but it was always something that people ended up ripping out later on.

Yep - Wikipedia says SDL was 1998 and Allegro was early 90s.

Not going to advocate DX12/Vulkan here but I do wonder how much of the game's CPU budget is eaten up in rendering code? From the start developers told us they wanted DX12 because the driver is too expensive (CPU-wise) because we do too much state tracking. Factorio is uniquely one of those games that can easily get CPU-bound so I'm hoping developers could weigh in on their experiences here.

From the driver's point of view DX12 drops half the work of the driver onto the apps to do themselves but the app teams are unwilling to put in the man-hours to do it right, so in the end they regress performance wise. Even big engines like Unreal are going about it wrong, but they have compelling reasons for that.

I was wondering something similar. We've seen how good the devs are at optimizing this stuff. I think with some of the neat features they could do that to ridiculous levels. My major concern is that DX12 is only on Windows 10 (I use 7). Vulkan has more support, however it's less of an established thing than DX - in another thread Posila said that it might happen if someone felt like it but it's somewhat incomplete and not supported by Apple.

[Ghoulish]

9X5DSYQ.png (733.39 KiB) Viewed 11110 times

Good luck with the graphics engine rewrite, can't wait to see the end results, and the upcoming UI changes too!

[tetryon]

Can you post the build that was used for the screenshots?

=)

[bobingabout]

Point of interest. no DX9 means no Windows XP support.... no big deal there really, since there's already no 32bit support.

but no DX10 support means no Vista support too.

I guess this would make windows 7 a minimum requirement, at least on the windows front anyway.

Also, for god sake, don't use SDL for graphics. I gave it a try, and it was crap. SFML wasn't bad though.

[Caine]

Picture: A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it's not that good

I disagree. It depends on the goal of the user interface. If high productivity is your goal then a learning curve is often necessary.

It is nearly impossible to make a tool simpler than its domain and there are some very complex domains out there.
E.g. 3D modelling software is not easy to use because 3D modelling itself is not easy.

[roidal]

Please. think about OpenGL 4.5 only ...

And effectively dropping OSX and almost all linux-support?

[Jarin]

Literally laughing till my sides hurt at today's FF. Thanks, guys.

Good luck with that graphics update... sounds like you've got your work cut out for you.

[Slayn25]

make sure you save your old code for the april fools update (-:

[DutchBully]

I have no clue what this all means to the game. I'm not that technically knowledgable. But having an older system to run Factorio on, most of my worries go to changes that dramatically affect FPS/UPS. The latest updates already gave alot of performance back, specially late game. Will changing this engine to own code and SDL undo that or actually improve FPS/UPS ?

DB

[Caine]

Will changing this engine to own code and SDL undo that or actually improve FPS/UPS ?

Most performance improvements seemed to be independent of the rendering pipeline. As for this change, time will tell but I am not that worried. The developers are pretty dedicated to make the game perform well.

[burisk]

What about OSX and Linux support for the future? And.. will be there higher requirements for HW after this engine change? Because, my MBP 15" 2015 on Full HD without smokes, and without maximum zoom-out works awesome without audible cooling (fans). So, I wonder what this do with this type of hardware.

[MeduSalem]

but no DX10 support means no Vista support too..

Microsoft doesn't support Vista anymore anyway for about a year now... and apart from that... good riddance.

[ili]

I don't know anything about game coding.
Just wanted to ask what is the difference between coding for OpenGL 3.2 VS Vulkan?
Is Vulkan harder to do?

[rkfg]

Vulkan would really help with parallel renderer, something that Factorio might not even need. It's not CPU-intensive on the graphics front from what I saw and read, the world updates eat most of the CPU. Vulkan allows to load all the cores when you prepare and fill the GPU buffers (commands, vertexes, textures etc.) but Factorio only uses 2D sprites and there's not that many of them on the screen at any given moment. So it's really hard to tell if increased programming complexity that Vulkan requires is worth it. Basically, with Vulkan the game developers writes their own videodriver optimized for this particular game. Not to the level of working with the GPU I/O ports and PCI-E bus but much closer to the hardware than what abstraction layers like OpenGL/D3D offer.

[Chaoseed]

Those bugs, while probably painful to deal with, were pretty amusing to look at! (And somewhere, Fred Brooks is nodding.)

[Ejsstiil]

My major concern is that DX12 is only on Windows 10 (I use 7). Vulkan has more support, however it's less of an established thing than DX - in another thread Posila said that it might happen if someone felt like it but it's somewhat incomplete and not supported by Apple.

I have the same concern. I am using Win 7 till I can, can't imagine myself to go into spyware and ugly os only because DX12

[Tricorius]

What about OSX and Linux support for the future? And.. will be there higher requirements for HW after this engine change? Because, my MBP 15" 2015 on Full HD without smokes, and without maximum zoom-out works awesome without audible cooling (fans). So, I wonder what this do with this type of hardware.

I kinda ... burned out the internal keyboard on my MacBook because I wasn’t paying attention to the heat (I also think the fans were misbehaving). So I commandeered my wife’s Alienware 17”. I’m glad you track your heat situation better than I did

[Panderturtle]

Nice work, new engine seems always to be a good thing.