A new update is available that improves Lua integration in Visual Studio Code and fixes Vulkan validation errors.

The SSAO effect has been improved with a denoise filter. Similar to Nvidia's RTX raytracing technology, this technique smooths the results of the SSAO pass, resulting in a better appearance.

It also requires far fewer sample and the SSAO pass can be run at a lower resolution. I lowered the number of SSAO samples from 64 to 8 and decreased the area of the image to 25%, and it looks better than the SSAO in Leaqdwerks 4, which could appear somewhat grainy. With default SSAO and bloom effects enabled, I see no difference in framerate compared to the performance when no post-processing effects are in use.

I upgraded my install of the Vulkan SDK to 1.2 and a lot of validation errors were raised. They are all fixed now. The image layout transition stuff is ridiculously complicated, and I can see no reason why this is even a feature! This could easily be handled by the driver just storing the current state and switching whenever needed, which is exactly what I ended up doing with my own wrapper class. In theory, everything should work perfectly on all supported hardware now since the validation layers say it is correct.

You can now explicitly state the validation layers you want loaded, in settings.json, although there isn't really any reason to do this:

"vkValidationLayers":
{
	"debug":
	[
		"VK_LAYER_LUNARG_standard_validation",
		"VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation"
	]
}

Debugging Lua in Visual Studio Code is improved. The object type will now be shown so you can more easily navigate debug information.

That's all for now!