Category: Status Reports

It’s been a while. AnKi’s development is continuing with some slowdown (I am a dad now). Some of the new features that landed in the codebase since the last update:

• Physical based rendering. Seems everyone is using it and now I can understand why.
• Cluster based deferred shading. Changed the (CPU hybrid) tile based with a brand new one that divides the space into clusters. It’s CPU hybrid once again. Avalance is (was) using something similar.
• Added tone mapping with eye adaptation.
• The lighting is fully HDR now.
• Added support for particles that react to lights. The new cluster based renderer allows me to do that which is pretty cool.
• Reworked the graphics backend to make it Vulkan friendly. I’ll start with the Vulkan backend when the drivers become a bit more stable (now they are in early beta state).
• Finally I worked with an artist for a few months to produce a game level. This level is helping me optimize the engine for real life scenarios. Ultimately I’ll produce a tech demo with it.

For the future:

• Continue creating a UI library (boring).
• Expand on a new idea for reflections.
• Expand on a new idea for global illumination
• Integrate Newton Game Dynamics even further (create joints and other stuff).
• Start on the Vulkan backend.

The first important change is the new home of AnKi. From now on AnKi’s source code lives on github and the address is https://github.com/godlikepanos/anki-3d-engine. In the technical side of things there is a brand new OpenGL 4.4 backend with a multithreaded rendering thread. In this new concept there is a dedicated thread exclusively serving OpenGL work. Other small features are the screenspace local reflections effect, removal of C++ exceptions, some steps towards a complete removal of STL (new string, dynamic array etc).

For the future we have plans to add Windows support. Steps have been made with AnKi compiling on Windows. Unfortunately there are some bugs that we need to address before declaring full Windows support. Another planed feature is integration with Newton Dynamics physics engine. Compared to bullet Newton seems less buggy, with more features and the most important for me is that its interface is superior (a simple C API). Other small features is an improved tile base deferred renderer, improved transparency, cascaded shadowmaps, OpenGL ES 3.1 support and other.

Some of the planed features of AnKi were discussed in the previous status report. Fortunately some of them were implemented but some are still under way. The interesting ones are a new optimized renderer architecture that uses tile based deferred shading, the other important change is that the engine’s scripting engine is now LUA with a custom binder solution and the last mega feature is the rethinking of the external libraries that AnKi uses.

One of the main goals of the past months were to remove/revise some of the external dependencies that AnKi had. Libraries like boost, Python and SDL were making the building of AnKi a bit complicated especially for some new targeted platforms (ARM Linux, Android etc). To solve that problem first I removed the pre-compiled external libraries (.so and .a) and created CMake for each of these libraries. Now for example libpng source lies in it’s own directory (extern/png) and it is connected to the AnKi general build system. The good thing about this is that we ensure that by having only a C++11 compiler you can build AnKi down to the last bit without the need to install or build anything yourselves. The second step was to remove some of the external libraries that made life difficult and/or lacked a few features. Boost replaced with C++11, Python with the lightweight LUA and the much loved SDL with custom backends (GLX/X11, EGL/X11 and more will follow). To see the external libraries and the way the are organized checkout the the source: svn co http://anki-3d-engine-externals.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

The last feature that is worth writing is the new renderer architecture. The tile based deferred shading renderer boosted the performance quite a bit. To be precise it doubled the speed of the rendering. An article is planed that will explain the implementation that AnKi uses along with some benchmarks.

For the future:

• Renderer: Move everything to using UBOs
• Renderer: Re-enable HDR and SSAO
• Core: Add loading thread that supports GL
• Scene: Finalize the octree optimizations
• Math: Make the library template based. Add NEON support
• Add GLES 3.0 support
• Add Android support

It’s been a long time since we had a status report. This doesn’t mean that AnKi is left behind but the new features are so difficult to implement and they require a big period of design, thinking and prototyping. One of the most important things that are going to be redesigned is the scene graph. It will move from a hierarchy based design to a component based one. This makes the engine very configurable and the process of adding new kind of objects far more easier. The downside of the scene graph reconstruction is that it requires re-design of the renderer as well. Both these modules are complex and changing them is very time consuming. At the present moment the scene is finished but the renderer is not yet.

Another module that got a face lift is the OpenGL. The idea is to make a wrapper that sits on top of OpenGL API that will offer an abstraction for different OpenGL implementations and latter who knows, maybe an API abstraction as well. The interesting things about the OpenGL module though is it’s thread safety and numerous optimizations that minimize the GL API calls. Especially the Texture class offers quite a few optimizations with the texture units and how the binding works.

Apart from the individual modules there is a broader change that affects almost everything, the move from C++03 to C++11. The idea here is to drop the boost library and make the engine more self sustained and less dependent to external libraries. This choice introduced and it will introduce quite a few problems though. The first is that the compilers are not that stable yet. Some of the features only live on the latest GCC and LLVM versions and I doubt they have been tested for production quality software. Another drawback is that some of the C++11 features have been implemented in the latest versions of LLVM and GCC. This practically means that you won’t be able to compile AnKi without GCC > 4.7 and LLVM > 3.1. The last drawback is to compiler support in general. At the present time only GCC and LLVM have a good C++11 support. This is not bad because AnKi is targeted for those two compilers but it wouldn’t hurt to be compilable by Intel’s compiler as well.

When the scene graph and renderer are over there are lots of changes and features that wait in line:

• Optimize the renderer. Removal of multiple render targets in deferred shading.
• Implement the loose octrees for visibility tests. Also add and test occlusion queries.
• Remove Python and put LUA. Preferably without LUA bind (because it requires boost).
• Remove SDL and write code for X11 directly. SDL still does not support shared context creation.
• Introduce two OpenGL targets. OpenGL 4.x and OpenGL ES 3.x. Especially the ES one (far future)
• Port the engine to Android with OpenGL ES 3.x hardware (far future)

That’s all.

PS: AnKi always seeks developers that want to help so if you are interested in contributing contact the main developer.