I wrote up some performance tuning notes for OBJs on the wiki. A few notes on how these rules will change with version 10:
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Everything on that note applies to version 10 too. If you’ve tuned your model for version 9, that effort will be worth it in version 10.
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A few rules are even more important in version 10 than before. In particular, I’ve done a lot of performance tuning for OBJ drawing, but you don’t get those wins if you use ATTRibutes. Clean your objects out for maximum speed.
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One special case: objects with very small vertex count are sometimes extra fast in version 10. For example, in version 9, a tree with 8 vertices and no attributes is horribly slow. In version 10, this tree will be quite fast. So in version 9 you might make the tree have 64 vertices and look nicer; in version 10 by keeping the tree lean and mean, you get a speed improvement.
Normal maps are expensive. A 2048 x 2048 normal map takes 22 MB of VRAM! So make sure you get every bit of image quality you can out of it. Two things to consider:
- Normal maps are uncompressed (because texture compression really screws up the normal map). So per-pixel detail will be preserved. Use it!
- VRAM is allocated for an alpha channel whether you use one or not. This is because the cards need 32-bit pixels for performance. So include an alpha channel in your normal maps and use it to modulate shininess; this can help create the illusion of different materials.
For scenery objects, do not include an alpha channel if you don’t need it. When textures are compressed, the alpha channel does take more VRAM, and X-Plane will hit a faster rendering path for textures with no alpha channel.
For quite a while now, I have been advocating in favor of DDS compression. I am pretty damned obstinate, but eventually if enough people yell at me, I get a clue. I have come to appreciate that there are some cases where DDS compression is not a net win; this blog post explains when it happens and what we might do in X-Plane 10 to work around this.
DDS – The Good, The Bad, the Ugly
DDS is a file format that contains image data pre-mipmapped (that is, the smaller versions of the image that the video driver needs are included) in a format that may or may not be compressed. DDS is virtually always used with a compressed image format (like DXT1 or DXT5). This has three positive effects for X-Plane:
- Because the image is already compressed, we save CPU time when loading the texture that would be spent compressing while X-Plane is running.
- Because small versions of the image (the “mipmap pyramid”) is already in the file, we save time down-sizing the image with the CPU, another win for load time.
- Because the image is compressed ahead of time, it can be compressed with a slow high quality compressor rather than a fast low quality compressor, so relative to other compressed images we get an image quality improvement.
The bad is that the DDS file does not contain the original uncompressed file. If the user unchecks “compress textures to save VRAM”, DDS files remain compressed. If the image file contains details that don’t compress well, they’re going to get splatted and stay splatted.
What If VRAM Grew On Trees?
My original heavy arguments for DDS were based on the idea that VRAM is a limited commodity; if we don’t compress textures, the user runs out of VRAM faster and has to go down a level of resolution…and once that happens, everything starts to look ugly.
But what if the user has 1 GB of VRAM? At this point, we’ve limited the maximum quality the user can see because we don’t have the original uncompressed image anymore, only the DDS/DXT version. This can be frustrating to authors who spent a lot of time on their textures.
If you ship PNGs with your airplane or scenery, turning off texture compression will reveal this beautiful, uncompressed image, but now when texture compression is on, the compression will be done by the video driver, and that will look extra ugly.
The Best Of Both Worlds
This is my thinking for version 10. (These are just musings, we haven’t coded this yet.) Currently DDS are preferred to PNG files. We could relax the load rules in version 10 to prefer PNG over DDS when texture compression is off and DDS over PNG when it is on. This would allow authors to ship both PNGs and DDS files and have the right one be picked for the scenario: the pre-compressed one when texture compression is on and the uncompressed one when compression is off.
I realized I have slightly better test shots of global illumination than the ones that got out a week ago. These are from only a day or two after the last shots.
This is the Cirrus again, with landing lights and strobes; you can see that all of the airplane’s lights contribute dynamically to the lighting on the fuselage and doors as they move. (Yes, that is heat blur on the engine; the heat blur still needs a lot of tuning.)
This shows airplane-mounted lights interacting with custom scenery. In this case the standard Cirrus (with global lights attached) casts both strobe and multiple landing light spill on LOWI. One of the powerful results of global illumination is that we get correct lighting interaction between diverse content, including third party content.
Finally, this shows an airport beacon lighting a plane and vice versa. The global lights on the airport beacon are inside an animation group, making them “sweep” the airplane, which can in turn animate the airport beacon. With global illumination, there are no rules about who lights who.
Thanks to my foolish use of unprotected directories, we have basically announced that X-Plane 10 will feature global illumination. Here is some basic information on global illumination.
What Is Global Illumination?
Global illumination is the ability of any part of an airplane or scenery system to cast light on any other part of the scenery system or airplane. In X-Plane 9, the only lights in the sim that ever actually cast cast light anywhere else are:
- The sun.
- The airplane’s landing light. (Even if your plane has many landing light billboards, there is only one spill effect.)
- Three 3-d lights in the 3-d cockpit.
This list was kept short due to the high cost per pixel of each light on all rendering.
When X-Plane 10’s global illumination is enabled, a “spill” light attached to any OBJ can shine light on anything near it. Since any OBJ can have a spill light, this means we can have light sources on airplanes, scenery, cars, whatever you want. The spill effects any 3-d scenery nearby, even from another scenery pack.
This kind of still effect can be simulated in X-Plane 9 by careful use of LIT textures. However, real global illumination works between art assets created by separate authors. You can drive your custom airplane up to a custom airport and the landing and logo lights on the airplane will cast light on the terminal; the apron lights from the terminal will cast light on the airplane.
Furthermore, global illumination is fully dynamic – as objects animate or move, the lighting effects are correctly applied in 3-d. This makes effects possible that cannot easily be created using LIT textures.
Requirements for Global Illumination
Like most new rendering tricks in version 10, global illumination will be a rendering option that can be optionally enabled by users who have a video card meeting hardware requirements. In the case of global illumination, that requirement is a DirectX-10 generation video card, e.g. any Radeon HD , nVidia GeForce 8000 or 9000 series, and “100” series (100,200,300,400 series).
For authors: global illumination is applied using named and parametrized lights on your OBJ. Anywhere you can attach a light billboard, you can attach a spill effect as well, with some tuning constants for how wide you want the light, etc.
It will be possible to create two versions of your LIT textures, one to be used when global illumination is enabled, and one when it is disabled. Thus if you are baking lighting into your textures with a 3-d modeling program, you can simply re-bake the lit texture with some lights disabled and add 3-d lights to your model. The result is an airplane with real 3-d lighting where possible, and a close approximation via baking otherwise.
Global illumination can be added to a model incrementally; existing art content will work normally with global illumination enabled or disabled, so authors can choose to add a few light spill effects or add a large number, as time permits.
The Cost of Global Illumination
Global illumination isn’t going to be free. The main cost is an increase in VRAM use and fill-rate. The cost of global illumination is mostly a one-time cost to put X-Plane into a new rendering mode. (Graphics nerds: global illumination is implemented via deferred rendering.) The incremental cost of lights isn’t that high, although a scene with a lot of lights will have impact.
My expectation is that users with new, highly capable high-end graphics cards will be able to run global illumination easily, but will lose some of the other benefits of fill rate. (For example, running at 2560 x 1024 + 4x FSAA is a lot more painful with global illumination than without.)
Global illumination also introduces two artifacts, both of which I am trying to minimize as best as I can. These artifacts are a function of deferred rendering – all games that use deferred rendering have to address these problems:
- The lighting calculations are shared between multiple translucent surfaces, which can create some strange effects. For example, if a translucent window is in shadow, the scenery behind the window will appear to be in shadow too.
- Traditional full-screen anti-aliasing is not available with deferred rendering. We should be able to offer a simulation of 4x FSAA as well as some kind of cheaper FSAA-approximation, but the cost will be quite a bit higher in fill rate than the 16x-style CSAA available now.
(Hardware-based FSAA can make a number of optimizations like CSAA to optimize throughput; this is how such high multiples as 16x are possible. Since our implementation is similar to “super sampling” and costs a real 4x in performance, 4x will be the highest setting.)
Why Global Illumination
Of the new X-Plane 10 rendering engine features (and there are a fair number of them), global illumination is certainly the one that has the most impact on the structure of the rendering engine. With global illumination, X-Plane effectively has two separate modes (“forward” rendering, which is the only mode X-Plane 9 has, and “deferred” rendering, which produces global illumination).
One of the reasons to get global illumination done earlier than other features was that implementing global illumination required rewriting or modifying nearly every piece of low level rendering code. Now that the work is in place, we can safely add new features and test them in both modes.
Global illumination also meets two requirements:
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Sergio has long observed the central importance of lighting and shadows in the look of X-Plane; at some point more polygons and better textures still look synthetic without a realistic illumination model. Global illumination makes a more realistic lighting model possible at night. Airports represent an environment that can hopefully take advantage of such capabilities in a big way.
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As hardware becomes more powerful, authors have to do more work to create content that takes full advantage of the rendering engine. We are reaching a point where artist’s time is going to be a limiting factor as well as hardware and engine capabilities. Global illumination thus kills two birds with one stone: it makes the rendering engine’s output look better, but it also makes the whole scene look better with less work by the artist.
(For example, when baking lighting into a model, the author must plan the model’s texture UV map to guarantee unique texture space for all spill effects. When lighting effects are dynamic, the author can simply texture so the model looks good without worrying about baking requirements.)
I sometimes get questions from authors considering how much to rely on a 2-d panel mapped to 3-d via the panel texture vs. a true 3-d panel. I can’t comment on what will look best, but I can comment on the relative performance characteristics of both techniques, and the answer might surprise you: in some cases you’ll get better performance by modeling directly in 3-d.
The 2-D Way
When you use the panel texture to make an object, X-Plane goes through a lot of steps to create the final result:
- Your panel has to be rendered in 2-d. We atlas your panel textures, but we don’t necessarily order them optimally – we don’t know the optimal order. Each generic instrument is at least one batch, perhaps even two. Those batches have very low vertex count, and the vertices are stored non-optimally on the CPU. There may be a fair number of texture changes between instruments.
- If you use ATTR_cockpit_region, we then go back and do the same thing…again! Why? Well, we need your panel’s raw color (“albedo” to graphics nerds) and the emissive light given off by anything self-lit separately, so that we can do correct 3-d lighting.
- Both of these are rendered to an off-screen texture that the video driver will feeel obligated to preserve at all costs, putting pressure on VRAM.
- Only when all that is done do we begin drawing your object, with the usual batches to change to panel texture and change back, perform animations, etc.
If this seems expensive, that’s because it is. Periodically users send me airplanes to look at their performance, and lately I’ve been seeing a lot more problems with 2-d panels (that fuel 3-d cockpits) being the performance bottleneck, not the 3-d modeling itself.
The 3-d Way
What if we want to go 3-d? Well, we’re going to “eat” a lot more of what your 3-d pit already has:
- You’ll need a lot more animations to move all of those parts.
- You’ll need new batches with ATTR_lit_level to dial up and down various lighting levels.
But you do get some advantages:
- Geometry in objects is processed about as optimally as we possibly can. All of that work we’ve done on the rendering engine to make OBJs fast is available in your cockpit. So you can increase 3-d detail ‘for free’.
- Your lit geometry can be drawn in a single pass (we don’t need to prepare two separate lit textures). So for example a needle would take three batches via the panel-texture route (a batch to rotate the needle for albedo, a second batch to draw the rotated night needle, and a third batch to draw the resulting texture in 3-d) but only one if you use the OBJ directly.
- Since you organize your textures for OBJs, you can guarantee that all of the cockpit stuff is together, saving texture thrash.
- You can use normal maps to add per pixel detail to your cockpit; panel textured geometry cannot be normal mapped.
A Balancing Act
Given the high cost of panel texture relative to native OBJ drawing, you’d think going native OBJ would be a no-brainer, right? Well, not quite.
A needle is an easy case: you can model a needle using a rotation animation, so your implementation in an OBJ and our generic instrument are quite similar. Same with the throttle lever generic instrument.
But what about a “glass pie indicator”? What about a moving map? What about a rotary?
There are some generic instruments that have “movement” for which there is no equivalent OBJ technique. With these generics, the generic instrument/panel code may be able to render the generic quite a bit more directly than your OBJ can simulate the same effect.
This is my suggestion on a cut-off: if you can directly model a generic instrument with an OBJ (needles, throttles, and other “simple moving things”), consider 3-d. If you would have to use a lot of extra texture space, copies of your mesh, or a lot of show-hides, use the panel texture.
Your goal should not be to eliminate the use of panel texture. But if you can cut panel texture down to a single 1024 x 1024 region from a larger area, you’ll probably see a performance win or a reduction in your airplane’s system requirements.
Performance Test First
Final thought: before you invest months in a complex cockpit design, mock up the “work-load” X-Plane must do and performance test it! For an OBJ, simply make one moving instrument and duplicate the mesh to get the number of expected animations. For the panel, drag out a bunch of instruments, make custom textures and just paint junk into them with photoshop. The goal is to make X-Plane do the same amount of work as it will in the final version. Then fly your test panel on target computers and observe performance.
A few years ago I blogged about gamma correction for png files. Here’s the very, very short version:
- PC and Mac monitors are calibrated differently. Dark tones on a PC appear darker than on a Mac. The curve of how colors are mapped to the monitor is the gamma correction curve, typically expressed as a number like 1.8 for Mac and 2.2 for PC. The higher the number, the more Gothic your dark tones.
- A png file can have a gamma value written into the file, which tells X-Plane (and anyone else) what kind of monitor the png was drawn on. This lets X-Plane brighten a png from a Mac when you are on a PC, and darken a png from a PC when you are on a Mac.
- If you leave off the gamma value on your png, we assume 1.8 (Mac) which can be bad if you’re a PC author.
While this is confusing, it was an improvement over the BMP situation (where everything was set up for a Mac and PC users had to simply crank their monitor brightness).
In version 9 we added a gamma correction setting to X-Plane. The setting you enter in the rendering settings is how “dark” your monitor is (bigger number = darker). We then attempt to compensate by lightening the textures more; thus a bigger number results in a lighter looking X-Plane (because you told us your monitor was dark and we tried to “fix it”).
There are two other developments since the original png situation which have unfortunately been a step backward in terms of X-Plane color correction.
DDS and Gamma
The handling of DDS and gamma is, to put it mildly, quite problematic. The problem is two-fold:
- DDS doesn’t actually have gamma information, so we can’t tag DDSes as having originated on Macs and PCs. So we assume a DDS is authored at a gamma of 1.8 (Mac). I think DDSTool correctly does a gamma correction when grinding files at other gammas.
- (If you are a real graphics programmer, please do not read this next sentence.) X-Plane attempts to adjust the color of the DDS in its compressed form. This is a big hack designed to keep framerate high, but it’s really not a very good idea. The result can be color distortion when a DDS is viewed at 2.2 gamma.
So that’s not good, but what happened next made things a lot worse.
Apple Goes Gothic
Apple adopted the sRGB color profile for OS X 10.6, which has a gamma curve of about 2.2. So now the situation with DDS is particularly ugly:
- All DDS are authored at a gamma of 1.8.
- All users are moving toward a display gamma of 2.2.
- X-Plane thus has to always color correct, but its color correction is low quality for performance reasons.
This is…very sad.
There are two things we can do about this:
- In the short term, we can provide post-decompression color correction. This will cost a (hopefully) small amount of framerate and improve color fidelity for users with 2.2 gamma. This is the kind of thing that any user with a modern card would want, but that we might make optional for users with very old hardware.
- In the long term, we can provide a gamma calibration in the text files that wrap DDS files so that authors can mark their DDS as already being 2.2. This will mean that for most users X-Plane won’t have to do any color correction at all.
In order to understand the difference between hiding geometry and disabling drawing, you need to understand that an OBJ triangle can serve many purposes. Broadly, those purposes are:
- Drawing (the most basic use).
- Collision detection, of which we have three flavors: collision of the plane with the object (“hard surfaces”, or “physics”), collision of the mouse with the panel (manipulators, or clickable triangles) and collisions of the camera with the airplane (“solid camera”, which constrains the camera).
Any given triangle can be drawn and/or used to check for any of these collisions*; attributes change what the triangle is used for.
By default, all triangles are drawn; ATTR_draw_disable marks future triangles as not being drawn. This allows you to make a triangle that is used only for collisions. Examples might include a “hot spot” in front of a region on the panel (the hot spot might be easier to click than a small switch) and an invisible simple mesh to constrain the camera.
By comparison, ANIM_hide effectively removes some triangles from your model (temporarily) for all uses – drawing and collision detection of any kind. If a door is hidden, it’s not only not drawn, but it’s not going to stop the camera moving through it either.
Some key points to these distinctions:
- Categorizing what a triangle is used for (drawing, various flavors of collisions) is static – that is, it is always the same for the object and never changes with datarefs or animation. This is intentional for performance reasons!
- Animation to hide triangles affects the triangle in every way consistently – drawing and collisions.
Generally, you will get better performance improvements by removing categories from a triangle than by hiding it. (That is, it is better to not have manipulators on your cockpit, so it isn’t mouse-click collision-checked, than to hide it.) But the purpose of ATTR_draw_disable and ANIM_hide are different enough that which you use will be determined by the effect you are trying to create.
Finally, note that hiding an object completely (that is, the object does no drawing) does not provide the maximum performance benefit of not having an object at all. ANIM_hide was created to allow authors to create clever effects, not as a performance enhancer!
* This is not quite accurate: airplane-object collision checks are only available in scenery objects, and camera/airplane or mouse/panel collision checks are only available in the cockpit object.
I was discussing plugin-controlled prop discs with a third party developer. The developer wanted to know if custom prop disc control would end up inside Plane-Maker. It may end up doing so, but I don’t think this would be nearly as useful as it would seem. What follows is my explanation to him of why this is.
Let me draw an analogy: when it comes to systems modeling, using a plugin is to Plane-Maker as using Blender is to using Plane-Maker.
Users who cannot use Blender are frustrated because they cannot make something as nice as those who are building planes out of OBJs. Sometimes they ask for more features in Plane-Maker, like: more stations! This new editing mode! Make the UI better!
But…you tell me: will Plane-Maker’s UI ever be as flexible and powerful as Blender? And if it ever did get to be that good, would that have turned out to be a good use of LR’s time, when Blender is already available?
The motivation for OBJ-based airplane geometry via third party tools is that what users want to do cannot be easily generalized into a few simple cases. Every plane is different, so a truly flexible platform is needed.
The prop disc (and other systems modeling problems) are the same way. In developing the prop disc graphics, I spoke with a number of third party developers who had already tried to push prop discs as far as they could go, were using plugins, were drawing themselves, as well as 25 other crazy hacks. I also spoke to our internal art team. And what I found was: no one had any consensus on how the prop disc system should work. Everyone wanted to tune a very specific set of behaviors to their peculiar art assets.
That’s what drove me to put it into a plugin. When we need an equation or a strategy we reach the point where we need more flexibility than Plane-Maker can exhibit. A plugin can encapsulate a strategy or technique in a way that Plane-Maker radio buttons cannot.
Consider what would happen if custom prop disc parameters were built into Plane-Maker. Everyone would have to wait until Austin implemented the prop disc algorithm they wanted. How would this be bad? Let me count the ways?
- How many algorithms do you think Austin has time to code? Not more than he has fingers on his right hand. Only the five lucky third party developers who get their algorithm coded will be happy with this.
- Austin code exactly what you want? Don’t get your hopes up.
- , what you asked for wasn’t what you wanted? We can’t change the behavior now, that would break compatibility!
- oh…your email got eaten by a spam filter? Too bad…no custom prop disc for you!
- Sorry, we don’t have a release vehicle lined up for the next 3 months. You’ll have to wait.
This problem is already happening across pretty much every aspect of systems modeling: airplane have unique, quirky systems which are usually useful for exactly one plane. It is not even remotely sustainable for X-Plane to code these things one at a time with a set of check-boxes. We might as well have a pop-up menu for every airplane ever invented, and simulate every single airplane inside the sim itself. Imagine the development costs…if a single high quality MSFS add-on sells for $30-$50…
Think of the prop disc via plugins situation (and the strobe lights are the same way) as an experiment in generic instruments for systems. By transitioning to a generic abstaction for instruments we’ve let a lot more users do exactly what they want with a small, high performance piece of code. The original instrument strategy (one of everything) reached a point where we simply couldn’t meet user needs in a cost-effective manner.
In X-Plane there are two fundamental ways that a texture can be painted “over” a background image:
- Blending, whereby the alpha channel of the new top layer decides how much we see the top layer vs. the background.
- Additive Lighting, whereby the new texture makes the background lighter.
Blending is more common. For example, if you build an OBJ, the object appears “in front of” the terrain via blending. With blending, you put the color of your new layer in the RGB channels and use the alpha channel to indicate opacity. 1.0 alpha = 100% opaque, 0.0 alpha = 0% opaque, and alpha in between will create a blend. If you omit an alpha channel, X-Plane will treat the entire layer as 100% opaque.
When a layer is applied using additive lighting, the resulting color is the sum of the background plus the new color, clamped to the maximum brightness we can show on screen. Additive lighting is good for simulating effects that really “add light”. Some examples of additive lighting in X-Plane:
- All lighting billboards are drawn additively.
- Instrument overlays are additive if you pick the appropriate mode in Plane-Maker. (The option is labeled “glass” for generics, since most glass instruments work by adding light to a nearly black screen.)
- The emissive (_lit) texture of an object is added to the albedo (daytime) texture using additive lighting.
Now just a little bit of math. In RGB color terms, black = 0,0,0 and white = 1,1,1. So if we add a pure black texture to a background additively we get:
new_r = old_r + overlay = old_r + 0 = old_r
new_g = old_g + overlay = old_g + 0 = old_g
new_b = old_b + overlay = old_b + 0 = old_b
In other words,when using additive light, adding “black” does nothing, preserving the background.
And this brings me to my main point: any time you have additive lighting you don’t need an alpha channel. You can simply make your additive lighting texture black for the parts you want to be “transparent”.
This is why I generally recommend that emissive _LIT textures for objects not have an alpha channel. In fact, for “back-lit” and “additive” instruments (these are instruments that use a second emissive _LIT texture) Plane-Maker will indicate a warning if the texture has an alpha channel. If you have a texture that is applied additively, you don’t need alpha.
At this point you might be wondering: Ben, if additive lighting doesn’t require alpha, and all lighting billboards are drawn additively, why the heck is there an alpha channel for custom lights?
The short answer is: there probably doesn’t need to be one; the original setup for lighting billboards inherited a number of idioms from older versions of X-Plane, going back to versions where lighting billboards were not additive* (and thus alpha was necessary).
The long answer is: the alpha channel is often as a general “intensity” control to turn the light up and down in amplitude, while the RGB channels are often re-interpreted in strange ways. So while RGBA color is not necessary from a graphics standpoint, it is handy that there are four color channels in the custom lights because that gives us one more parameter to play with when designing really compicated lights (like VASIs).
* Note that lighting billboards that aren’t additive don’t look very good…hence Austin switched to additive billboards.
