SpiderPig

Is there anyone around here that would like to join a C++ project made in Ultra as a programmer? I can't offer payment (yet) but if anyone wants to expand their skills or just have a bit of fun. There's more info about the project here : https://discord.gg/HB8yZMfvtP What I'm looking for is someone who wants to contribute to some already existing C++ code I have, and making some more classes together in the future. What ever you contribute to, you can use that code in your own project. I have things like; Godot's UI system (90%) Voxel Terrain (80%) Streaming Voxel Terrain (80%) Procedural Foliage Generation (80%) Character Generators (10%) Perlin & Simplex Noise (100%) Terrain Generators (80%) Dynamic Sky Shader (50%) Much, much more! I'm not sure how I'll share the code yet, maybe GIT HUB? Even if someone wanted to make some of these things as LUA components / extensions for the editor, we can discuss that. Just thought I'd see who's out there.

I've noticed a drop in performance too but havn't had time to investigate yet.

Another option for the publisher would be to exclude certain files. Like "exe" should be included but "_d.exe" should be excluded. Sometimes we might want to publish the debug stuff and other times not. Even being able to save certain publish configurations would be nice. We could change between a debug publish config and a release publish config.

I've found this is needed for uploading to Steam. When you encrypt / compress one large zip file and change only a small file in that zip, the zipping algorithm must be changing all the bytes of the zip file, because the Steam uploader will upload the entire zip again, no matter the size. It makes creating small updates for your game impossible.

It does, thankyou! 1. I have no immediate plans for this. Mesh shaders by themselves are not very useful. You need content that is designed to work with mesh shaders. Of course, mesh shaders can be used directly if you write OpenGL code. I am planning to add new rendering hooks in soon, and it will be a lot easier to handle than it was in the Vulkan renderer. If this means that we can do it ourselves with opengl if we need then I am happy! 2. This is doable without much trouble. You can probably access it already if you just go into the Render:: namespace. This is great, I'm going to look into this during the week. 3. I plan to keep terrain in the editor as a static object oriented at the center of the world for the immediate future. Future development is going to go in the direction of very large scale terrains, and then finally planet rendering. Okay, so I take it it will be a completely new system? 4. This is possible,. but it sounds like a very niche feature not many people would have use for. This would be good to see as advanced features like this enable people to do different things. But if we can do something like this ourselves with Mesh / compute shaders and having access to the mesh array, then that is okay. 5. I expect version 1.0 will be done by Christmas at the latest, maybe by Halloween. The only major features left to implement after the next update are particles and GPU culling. Awesome! That's what I was hoping for. 6. Since 64-bit floats require a lot of auxillary features to be useful, I have no estimate of when this will be added. It's tied to large-scale terrain and geo-spatial features. Okay, as long as it is guaranteed to happen and I'm not holding out for a feature that may get ditched, then that's fine. I can use origin shifting for now in my project. Thanks for the detailed answers! If I can get a basic foliage system going for voxel terrain with compute shaders and the mesh array, I'm sticking with Ultra.

@Josh I'm at a point where I need to know if Ultra is going to be the best choice for developing my project. As you know my project uses voxel terrain and so can not work with the foliage system. I thought I could implement something my self using compute shaders but it is not currently possible as we have no access to the underlying mesh array the engine uses. What I need to know are; Will mesh shaders be implemented? Will we have access to the mesh array so we can create meshes with compute shaders? (this might be part of mesh shaders) Will the foliage system work with multiple terrains as well as the foliage layer being able to be rotated with a terrain? Will we have the ability of creating a mesh layer that does not need a terrain? This would be a simple grid of meshes that we can use a map for XYZ displacement and a map for visibility. The entire layer should be able to translate and rotate like any other entity. This is really what I need for foliage on a voxel terrain but it can have many other uses as well. E.g. making cities or anything else that we don't want to create 20,000 entities for. What's an ETA for v1.0? Are we talking by the end of the year or the end of next year? Some sort of idea of what you're aiming for would be very helpful. Are 64bit floats defiantly coming? Soon after v1.0 or more like 2 years away? I hope you can shed some light on these questions. Thankyou.

MSV v143 - VS2022 (v14.37 a17.7)

Is it a new project with 0.9.7?

I've not been able to get Ultra to compile in anything other than VS2022. I think Ultra needs platform toolset v143 which I think is only compatible with VS2022. Your current error though is because it can't find the right path to Ultra. Maybe check UltraEnginePath in PropertyManger->PropertySheet->UserMacros and see what that points too.

Both of these DDS files, which will load okay as a texture, will not load as a pixmap. LoadPixmap() returns null. EDIT : Okay the DIFF texture needed the ISPCTexComp plugin loaded and it works. But the NORM texture stills fails to load as a pixmap. EDIT : I know what the problem is now. The following code will not load the pixmap because I think loading it as a texture first has marked the file sas in use or something. If this is the cause I think LoadPixmap() needs an error to be printed to the console. auto mat = LoadMaterial("MyMat.mat"); //<- contains Stone_DIFF.dds in slot 0 auto pixmap = LoadPixmap("Stone_DIFF.dds"); //<- returns null Stone.zip

This is half the reason why I want to make grass that is pure geometry and does not discard pixels. It seems counter intuitive but in some cases it seems that having more triangles is better than using billboards.

Yeah give it a go and see. I'm not sure about a clean install that removes the path data. It's either registry keys or maybe the config file for Ultra. I forget where that is, ProgramData\Ultra Engine maybe? Welcome

Did you install visual studio with "desktop development with C++" selected?

Did the redistributables install ok?