Re: Demo for The Art of Reflection released (a 3D game and engine fully written in D)

2024-05-24 Thread Lewis via Digitalmars-d-announce

On Friday, 24 May 2024 at 19:22:32 UTC, Jonathan Gerlach wrote:
I'm impressed. Are you using DirectX "11 on 12" or standard 
DirectX11? Did you need to avoid the GC at all? I imagine the 
GC could ruin your framerate if you're not careful. Thanks for 
sharing and congrats on finishing (close enough) your game.


Plain old DX11. I've used DX12 in industry, and it basically 
amounts to opting in to writing 70% of the graphics driver along 
with your renderer :) I don't need to push AAA levels of 
performance or asset load for this game, so DX11 is fine.


Regarding the GC, copy-pasting my reply from Discord:

I don't have the GC fully disabled, but I make a point to avoid 
GC allocations in runtime code. I allow myself to use it for 
initialization, tooling, editor code, etc. For runtime code it 
really just acts as a fallback. If I messed something up, a 
memory leak just becomes a periodic hitch instead of an eventual 
crash.


I've also hacked some changes into druntime to help with this:
- I added a "scrapheap" GC implementation, which is a simple 
linear allocator that resets at the end of each frame. I have a 
mixin that makes a scope use the scrapheap instead of the regular 
GC, which is useful for allowing me to still use phobos or other 
libraries, as long as I'm okay with all allocated memory being 
discarded at the end of the frame. Each worker thread also gets 
one, which resets when a unit of work completes.
- I added a quick and dirty mode I can enable that logs the 
callstack of every GC allocation, to help me track down stray 
allocations that occur during runtime. @nogc is too restrictive, 
and doesn't understand that my scrapheap usage bypasses the GC.


Runtime allocations that need to stick around almost entirely use 
a structure I've internally called a GenerationalStorage. Pretty 
common idea in games, a fixed size object pool that hands out 
IDs, and IDs can be used to retrieve a pointer to the object. 
Each ID contains the object's index, along with a generation 
number that increments every allocation, letting you reliably 
catch and assert on any use-after-frees of IDs.


Demo for The Art of Reflection released (a 3D game and engine fully written in D)

2024-05-24 Thread Lewis via Digitalmars-d-announce
Hello! Not sure if it's of interest, but I've been developing a 
3D game and engine in D for a few years, and finally have a demo 
up on Steam for anyone interested in poking around (Windows only 
unfortunately).


- All code (engine and game) written in D. Shaders in HLSL. 
External libraries used for some subsystems (eg. PhysX, FMOD)

- Custom 3D DX11 renderer using PBR + IBL
- Supports mirror rendering, with hundreds of simultaneous 
mirrors and recursive mirrors (passing seamlessly through mirrors 
is a core game mechanic)
- Asset burning/cooking system for textures, geometry, materials, 
and shaders. All asset types support hotswapping.
- Flexible code hotswapping, by putting 99% of the game and 
engine in a DLL
- Scrappy in-game level editor that supports editing during 
gameplay


Since I'm building the game as a commercial project I haven't 
released source code, but plan to open source it after the game 
releases. Happy though of course to answer any questions, share 
code snippets, techniques, general experiences, etc.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/2290770/The_Art_of_Reflection/


Re: Visual D 0.44 released - VC project integration and Concord debugger extension

2017-03-12 Thread Lewis via Digitalmars-d-announce

On Sunday, 12 March 2017 at 12:09:10 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:

Hi,

I'm glad to finally announce the release of a new version of 
Visual D, the Visual Studio extension for the D programming 
language.


[...]


This looks awesome, thanks Rainer!


Re: Release D 2.071.0

2016-04-10 Thread Lewis via Digitalmars-d-announce

On Thursday, 7 April 2016 at 07:44:48 UTC, Nordlöw wrote:

On Tuesday, 5 April 2016 at 22:43:05 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:

Glad to announce D 2.071.0.


I read somewhere recently about performance regressions in DMD. 
Were these related the import and module fixes? Were they 
fixed? Do they depend on any dmd switches?


Thanks anyway!


I just updated one of my projects from 2.069.0 to 2.071.0, and 
saw the build time jump from ~1.7s to ~2.5s. Take this single 
informal data point with a huge grain of salt obviously, but I am 
also curious about the details of this. DMD's speed is one of D's 
selling points to me, and I might roll back until performance 
improves if there isn't a straightforward fix.


Agreed though, otherwise a great release. Thanks for everyone's 
hard work!