RenderRambling

Welcome to a page to keep track of notes about the rendering in xoreos. For now it is focusing on Neverwinter Nights (or NWN for short). Occasionally other games are actually tested as well, but NWN serves as the primary testing ground with the hopes that it will at least be semi-relevant for other games.

This rambling start is coming about from recent attempts to incorporate lighting into NWN, which has exposed some weaknesses in the render pipeline structuring. For a bit of history, the rendering has change much and was done with knowledge of how things "should be" at the time - this knowledge has changed, and with it the realisation that some of the nice ways of handling rendering will need workarounds and become not so nice. By rambling a little here of how things are, it's hoped that a way forward will become more clear.

Confused yet? Yes? Good. Me too.

Rendering at current applies the concept of a combination of a mesh, surface (vertex data and shader), and material (fragment data and shader) into a complete rendering information object. Shaders are constructed with a builder, and used as the basis for a surface or material; a surface or material is essentially a list of data to bind into shader locations. Need the same tiled texture across every room? No problem, the same material handles it. There's always some per-object (in xoreos terms, per-modelnode) information which can be bound as necessary: object transform, alpha (transparency) for example, and therein is the problem being run into with the lighting.

Sharing surfaces and materials allows for a render queue to be constructed which minimises swapping shaders (because that's relatively expensive). Note the mistake here: designing for optimised rendering before everything is fully understood. NWN has a lot geometry transparency going on too, which means there's sub-optimal shader swapping just to deal with depth sorted rendering anyway. Per-object alpha values start to break the assumption of being able to share materials. Then lighting can add ambient, diffuse, specular, and other properties - all of which could be different for every single object (modelnode).

This was a key misunderstanding: shared materials aren't really a concept for NWN. Shared textures perhaps, but not properties. Suddenly every single modelnode starts to need a very large block of custom data for material (but not surfaces as it turns out - they're just mesh data for the most part and easily shared). Perhaps most of this approach comes from the rendering APIs available when the game was made, mainly OpenGL1.2 - a very state-based API. It was quite feasible to simply change state for every render operation, so it's only natural games would incorporate that into the design.

So what to do now? The renderqueue class is almost completely useless if taken to that extreme, and surfaces and materials are far too heavyweight. Strip the latter down to bare essentials: convenient binding of data pointers to shader locations. Material and surface managers can be removed, and objects brute forced (for now). If common blocks of per-object information are identified and handled in the shaders correctly, then this actually helps at some point in the future: just bind that information block to some buffer object and suddenly batched rendering is possible again (just not so easy with OpenGL 2.1). More importantly, this dramatically simplifies the code and makes it easier for others to work with. Side note: shader construction is complex, but looks to be standing up alright. The shaderbuilder is very convenient for not having to keep track of multiple shader files, so that can stay.

Back to lighting. Right now everything is pushed to a queue, sorted, rendered. Lights, however, are applied to transparent surfaces, opaque surfaces, everything - and there are a lot of lights in a NWN level. The transparency is key here, and that's not good for any sort of deferred lighting setup. It needs to be a forward renderer. There are far too many lights to simply bind them all in one large shader uniform (arguably they could be put into a buffer object, but uniform data still needs to index into that anyway), and it's not feasible to iterate over lights that have no influence over the current fragment. In other words, objects need to know which lights are active in the immediate surroundings. This is again bad for batched queues, but relatively trivial with immediate objects rendering if the list of lights can be quickly calculated.

Knowing which lights are close to an object (not just a modelnode, but the parent object - it's assumed lighting will impact all modelnodes of a model, and all models of a single object) means some kind of volume based hierarchy to properly manage it all. Current rendering just takes modelnodes, but knows nothing of the parent object. What does this mean? NWN could very likely do with a scenegraph of some kind (quadtree, or possibly just a grid seeing as areas are tile based). This could help visibility culling, traversing would relatively quickly build a lighting list without trouble, and knowledge of objects could help with rendering order, for example making sure that the tops of tile data (often transparent) are rendered last. It is definitely worth keeping in mind that this is very NWN-specific. It makes senses to therefore create a class that is dedicated to rendering NWN in a specific fashion. Other games can copy and modify as necessary. This class would need to be hooked into the graphics loops somewhere - the graphics loop doesn't, and shouldn't, know if NWN or Jade Empire is being rendered.

Removing some of the rendering management is not trivial work, but should be straight forward enough. Creating some kind of volume hierarchy and making sure objects are correctly updated, that's more tricky. NWN already has the Area class which looks to handle the majority of map data, so something hooked into there would be beneficial. Area also contains information on tiles, which in turn have main and source lights. Initial testing just needs lists of everything - hierarchies are intended to simplify calculations, but it can be very inefficiently brute forced to have it all function, then optimise with a proper hierarchy later.

On the topic of tiles and main lights, it looks like main lights should have a radius of 7. This is close to the diagonal "radius" of a tile (each tile is 5x5). The light radius and other properties other than colour aren't currently known where to find. They might be hard coded. Main light radius should cover the tile it's part of, but not extend too far beyond: enough to blend into other tiles, but not enough to cover entire large rooms or bleed through walls.

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Continuing on from above (perhaps this should be put into a different page) and there are a few advancements in local builds. Light information, it turns out, is stored in modelnode controllers. This makes sense really: controllers can act as animation keyframes, and the radius, intensity, colour, etc, of a light could all change. Think of a flickering candle, or the light given off by fireworks: they aren't static lights. Inspecting controllers from model files and it appears that tile main lights will generally have at least a radius and multiplier value. The radius of main light 1 looks to generally be 14, with main light 2 being 5. The multiplier value generally looks to be 1. For candles, the multiplier has been zero. I'm not quite sure how the radius and multiplier values map to OpenGL lighting equations: the radius very likely impacts the linear coefficient, probably based on the light attenuation falling to some value (0.5, 0.25, 0.1, could be anything really) but the multiplier? No idea currently.

All this is very nice and allows some playing around with lighting to see what fits. Mesh ambient values are just source colour component-wise multipliers, easily added to the shaders. On the topic of mesh, let's take a step back a moment and look at modelnodes in general. Currently all mesh data is added to a mesh manager to prevent duplication. This is now wrong. Model caches mean that model files are only loaded once, and so the mesh data is only going to exist once within the model's node hierarchy. There's simply no need to use the dedicated mesh manager in this area anymore, and removing the usage means cleaner code and fewer hacks (always nice).

Not to say that the mesh manager is entirely useless. It's still good to keep some engine default meshes around: wireframe boxes for debug and development purposes (showing bounding volumes for example), squares, circles, that sort of thing. So it still serves a important purpose, just not for the mesh data from nodes.

Models are generally referenced by a placeable, door, character, or some such class. Models can be immediately rendered, kept in a cache and removed when nothing more uses it, provide animation details, attachment points, etc - but a model is still only referenced. This means the model data and its entire hierarchy shouldn't be modified, or else multiple objects might be impacted. It all gets a bit more murky from here. Objects will need to track which state their reference to the model is (door open, closed, damaged, etc), which keyframe might be applied to animations, if something is attached (a character holding a weapon) location, orientation, scaling that's applied, and so on. All of that isn't so difficult, but models can also contain lights (normal lights and shadow casting lights) and emitters (particle effects). Lights and emitters aren't simply rendered as the node hierarchy is traversed, and the list of lights impacting each object must be runtime calculated.

Lights are effectively going to be generated for each object and their duration tied to the object, but referencing model data, possibly individually animated, and globally available to see which objects each light influences. Also, tile lights are treated slightly differently just because.