XenkoByteSized
Intended as a sort of dumping ground for various small samples of using Xenko to do various things, like procedurally generate meshes.
Project is currently on Xenko 3.1.0.1-beta02-0752.
XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.TetrahedronMesh
A simple example of creating a mesh procedurally by supplying vertices, also calculates normals automatically. Can be observed in the scene that loads when you open the project aside from the source itself.
Uses only a vertex buffer to be as simple as possible.
XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.Cubemesh
Another example of creating a mesh procedurally, in this case with with an index buffer and instead for a cube (as it makes sense finally to use an index buffer here)
24 vertices, 36 indices.
XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.SubdividedPlaneMesh
A somewhat less simple example of expanding upon the above, generates a subdivided plane with a configurable width, height and number of subdivisions in each quadrant.
Uses a HeightfieldColliderShape for collision, somewhat absurdly calculates this from the mesh data rather than deriving the mesh data from the heightmap data, but alas.. It works well enough here.
Still does not use any index buffer, probably should.
Has some basic operations possible like:
- Raising/Lowering terrain (Left/Middle Mouse)
- Smoothing terrain (Shift + Left Mouse)
- Leveling terrain (Ctrl + Left Mouse)
- Dropping orbs on the terrain (Spacebar)
(scrollwheel to change marker radius for terrain)
Can also be observed in the same scene
XenkoByteSized.SplitScreen
A fixed size splitscreen example, with the view being split up in left and right and rendered by different cameras.
This one is slightly harder to simply link to some code to illustrate, you'll want to explore the following to see whats going on:
- Scenes/SplitScreenScene
- Scenes/SplitScreen/SplitScreenCompositor
- Scenes/SplitScreen/LeftTexture
- Scenes/SplitScreen/RightTexture
The scene itself:
A relevant piece of the compositor setup, where the default CameraRenderer at the root has been replaced by a SceneRenderCollection, as can be seen in this page on the Xenko Docs about render targets.
Misc Considerations
Of the most important bits to consider here are:
- The main renderer renders only the sprites for each of the render textures, (Group 31 in our case), while the render targets render everything except Group 31 (can be observed by looking at the RenderMask in the GraphicsCompositor for each renderer).
- I created a special script which just takes the center offset at which to place the render texture on screen, a reference to the render texture, the render group it should be in (to not be rendered by the split screen cameras) and creates the sprite for it.
- I made sure the main camera goes through a forward renderer without postfx (so render left and apply postfx, render right and apply postfx, then the main path composits but does not apply postfx).
XenkoByteSized.TriggerScene - DoorScript
A small two room scene that uses a trigger volume to show/hide a door and enable/disable its collider so the player can pass through.
Also comes with a PlayerController set up with a simple capsule collider so you can walk around in the small scene.
The scene itself is composed entirely out of primitives.
(might revisit this to make the door not just pop out of existence)
XenkoByteSized.VehicleScene - VehicleScript
A small scene using rigid bodies together with constraints to create a small vehicle composed of a solid block and 4 cylinders connected to the block with a Generic6DofConstraint for each cylinder, each constraint limited in rotation such that each cylinder only rotates like you might expect a wheel attached to an axle act.
So we get a vehicle that can roll on these cylinders!
To understand this sample I recommend experimenting with it, changing the type of constraint and adjusting limits etc.
(will probably revisit this to let the front wheels turn)
XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.CombinedMeshes - Shader: MultiMeshShader
So this is a sample of using streamout/transform feedback [1] [2] to render a lot of geometry at once.
To be precise, in our case it's 4096 cubes.
How does it work? In a few steps.
- With a small custom render pipeline and our shader we render without a pixel/fragment shader with
DrawIndexedInstancedin order to do our "instancing", which in fact only outputs our transformed geometry to another buffer (our stream out buffer:streamOutBufferBinding) n number of times, where n is how many separate instances we want to render. - We take the ModelComponent + Mesh that we have Xenko-side and set its
MeshDraw's vertex buffer to be our newly created streamout buffer (which we also flagged as a vertexbuffer). At this point we're in business!
In our example we haven't given any thought to multiple materials, or materials at all for that matter, but for each involved entity there is a unique transform that is applied, and now also a unique colour thanks to tebjan as you can see in the shader.
Note that this probably only works on DX11 (maybe DX12)
Misc
The sample also switches out the graphics compositor to the one associated with the scene being switched to currently, currently only relevant for the SplitScreen sample.