June 2018 Development Update

Due to the vacation period, this post is somewhat delayed, but the wait is finally at an end. Here is the new update with a selection of the developments in June.

OpenGL on macOS

At the Apple WWDC in June of this year, Apple formally announced the deprecation of the OpenGL graphics API, in favor of an Apple-only graphics API called Metal. This move puzzled many as a lot of software is relying on OpenGL for macOS support, including Panda3D, and investing significant resources into developing a whole new rendering back-end to support just a relatively small segment of the market is hard to justify.

While it seems likely that—despite the deprecation notice—Apple will continue to include OpenGL support as a part of macOS, we will need to start looking at another approach for maintaining first-class support for high-end graphics on macOS. It would be nice if there were one next-gen graphics API that would be well-supported on all platforms going forward

Enter MoltenVK. This is an implementation of the cross-platform Vulkan API for macOS and iOS, implemented as a wrapper layer on top of Apple’s Metal API. It has recently been open sourced by the Khronos group, in an effort to make Vulkan available on every operating system. Despite being a wrapper layer, it was still found by Valve to have increased performance benefits over plain OpenGL. This will let us focus our efforts on implementing Vulkan and thereby support all platforms.

Accordingly, we have increased the priority towards developing a Vulkan renderer, and it has made several strides forward in the past months. It is still not quite able to render more than the simplest of sample programs, however. We will keep you updated as developments unfold.

Mouselook smoothness improved

In order to implement camera movement using the mouse, many applications use move_pointer to reset the cursor to the center of the window every frame. However, when the frame rate gets low, the mouse movement can become choppy. This is usually only an issue occurring on Windows as other platforms support the M_relative mouse mode, which obviates the need to reset the mouse cursor. For all those who can’t or don’t use this mode, a significant improvement in smoothing this movement has now been worked out.

In previous versions, small movements that occurred between the last iteration of the event loop and the call to move_pointer could have been ignored, causing the mouselook to become choppy. This has been fixed by changing the get_pointer() method to always obtain the latest mouse cursor position from the operating system, resulting in more accurate mouse tracking. In the future, we will further improve on this by emulating relative mouse mode on Windows and perhaps even adding a new interface for handling mouselook.

Grayscale and grayscale-alpha support with FFmpeg

Panda3D’s implementation of FFmpeg now gained the ability to load videos that only contain grayscale colours more efficiently, greatly reducing the memory usage compared to the previous approach of converting all videos to full RGB. This is also extended to videos that have a grayscale channel as well as an alpha channel for transparency. Do note, however, that not all video formats support grayscale pixel formats.

Removing ‘using namespace std’ from Panda3D headers

C++ users, take note: besides the changes to add better C++11 support, we have also eliminated the bad practice of having using namespace std; in the public Panda3D headers. This prevents the entire std namespace from being pulled in and causing namespace clashes. If your codebase relied on being able to use standard types without an explicit std:: prefix, you may need to add using namespace std to your own headers. It would be even better to fully qualify your references to standard types and functions with an std:: prefix or—where appropriate—pull in specific types with individual using std::x; statements.

Bullet Vehicle chassis-to-wheel synchronisation

Using Bullet’s BulletVehicle class to simulate car physics had a problem with syncing the wheels to the chassis if the wheels were parented to the the vehicle’s RigidBodyNode. The wheel models would always be one frame ahead of the chassis model, resulting in visible artifacts as the wheels would appear to move away from the chassis. Especially if the vehicle accelerates to a significant speed, the wheels may appear to drift quite far from the vehicle. This bug was fixed thanks to a contributor.

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