To be completely honest, calling it the “fastest” is there to grab people’s attention, but this does not belittle its speed. And in regards to the “quality over quantity” aspect, I completely agree with you! We have different visions.
I really advocate for a healthy community, and I really love seeing other people’s work on the subject. I really did not like the lack of accessibility to proper ray/path tracers, so that’s also another reason that I’m making RADIUS.
I’m a young person. I was naive and still am. Please forgive me if those buzzwords provoked you, in which case I will remove them from the post.
Thank you for the kind words; regardless of how you presented the initial post it is incredibly impressive what you’ve done and you definitely should be proud of that.
I am just a stickler for letting work speak for itself, and it’s hard to demonstrate the effectiveness of its performance if there’s no reference against other publicly available solutions if that’s what you initially claimed; it’s very exciting what you’ve done and I do believe your system will be up there, but it’s gotta have data to back that up if that’s how you wish to present it.
I made a basic raycasting engine for fun some time ago, and I think it was using 8 or 10 of my 12 threads, but I ran it today, and it was using 3 threads, looking at the micro profiler
Parallel lua was already bad, due to its very significant overhead, but now it’s just garbage…
I know that trick, but it looks like garbage still. It’s great for faking lenses on cameras or other meshes like that, but for actual reflections like mirrors, it starts to fall apart. I also don’t like the viewportframe trick, because the graphics in viewportframes are different than the client’s graphics, and they can get pixelated and buggy when you move around.
Just been doing occasional tweaks here and there; I’ve rewritten how the post-processing stages work so there’s now the ability to individually toggle the following:
Renderer: Smoothing
Removes significant artifacts from provided render
Renderer: Anti-Aliasing
Helps eliminate those jaggies
Renderer: Sharpening
Used to bring back some definition lost in the smoothing process
Roblox: Bilinear Filtering
Takes advantage of the GPU via Roblox’s ImageLabel for a ‘free’ final smoothing of the image; not recommended for low resolutions, but helps smooth things out beyond a certain resolution.
Looks like this is really shaping up. Looking forward to seeing just good this is at rendering quality compared to Roblox’s current systems. Just wondering, should this eventually be put into a game on Roblox, how do you plan to adhere to the 3 thread limit? Do you think you will have to sacrifice a lot of the quality?
There is an engineer that responded here by essentially saying (And I paraphrase):
The system works, and it could definitely take advantage of the hardware, but we won’t publicise information that may change on-the-fly.
Personally the philosophy of writing parallel code is to ensure that you can maximise the performance out of the hardware you are running it on. It could be that Roblox is holding back the worker limit to retain parity with lower-end mobile devices so developers don’t end up making games that become too demanding for them; however this would be a fallacy since this kind of bottlenecking is already possible (And much easier to accidentally do by developers) by stressing out the GPU.
So if I was to make use of the renderer in its current state while upholding the 3-worker limit, I would disable both Global Shadows and Light Shadows, and set my game to take place at night/dark setting; perhaps taking advantage of horror-type games lending itself well to low resolution content.
(A relevant example of this combination would be REPO)
I see, it may just end up lying as a limitation of the engine instead of something that could ever change; although I hope Roblox listens to the developer community and eventually improves their multithreading system. Even better if we could run code on the GPU.
I guess you’ll just have to keep probing for any kind of openings to maintain the quality while keeping the performance tax at a minimum. Despite the limitations, this is still awesome.
I take advantage of ResampleMode as the final stage of post-processing; So I can choose to use bilinear or nearest neighbour sampling for the output of the image with virtually no additional cost to the frametime.
Bilinear is good to use when the output resolution gets closer to the display resolution (In development I tend to prefer having it on at 480p and beyond), but I wouldn’t want to use it for example at 288x162, which is the resolution that the provided image is displayed at.
Hi folks! Here’s a list of things I’ve done with the renderer lately:
EditableImage Vignette Overlay:
Playing with EditableImages I decided to create a custom vignette overlay that matches the same resolution as the renderer, as well as respecting bilinear/nearest neighbour sampling. I’ve placed it in a separate ImageLabel over the renderer output as to not incur any performance penalty
(This example is at an exaggerated strength of 1.5)
Studio Support / No Client Required:
The renderer is compatible in both server and client contexts by changing the RunContext property on only 2 of its scripts! Iterating has been important to me when working on this and now I do not have to load up a player client in studio every time I want to test something. I also recognise that this would be incredible to have integrated as a plugin should a game be developed using this rendering method!
Improved Scheduling / Reduced Input Latency:
By tinkering with the order of when the renderer begins processing a frame and by exploring Parallel Luau in more detail; I have created my own on-demand Serial/Parallel context switcher that doesn’t rely on multiple RunService events! This has enabled me to greatly improve load balancing during the raytracing process, granting better performance and matching input latency with Roblox’s own rendering pipeline.
x2 Render Quality Is Now Viable:
All the previous videos I’ve shown have had its render quality set to the base level (x1). Because of the improvements made to the renderer’s scheduling and various ongoing optimisations, I am happy to share the video below using x2 render quality
I am currently inhaling with regards to this project.
With anything I work on I follow an inhale/exhale process.
When on the inhale part, I learn information about something and allow my mind to stew on it a bit so that I can build a certain image in my head of how things are supposed to go, including taking notes; in terms of game design this could be seen as iterating on the design doc of a new project before working on it.
I feel that I have exhausted my current knowledge with this topic and while I still consider myself capable of adding other features like texture mapping, I have been doing research into how other engines manage real-time global illumination; I could easily be missing certain fundamentals that may help address how other core features are implemented.
Long story short, I have major/seemingly-impossible challenges ahead of me, and given the current 3-worker limit for Parallel Luau, it may be that I would have to port outside of Roblox in order to pursue my goal.
That’s a great plan. Personally I have been watching Wintergatan on Youtube, because it’s like what you’re saying about iterating on a design and allowing time for ideas to come together.
Yea, global illumination is going to be really tough. I am really curious about porting outside of Roblox. I don’t think I have seen any rendering projects run outside of Roblox yet, I could be wrong. I have seen projects like Mineplay Crossplay (Minecraft and Roblox crossplay game) run well, better than I thought. Even though RADIUS is fast, shaders are realtime if they run above 60 fps so that might be the first goal (I still think RADIUS is impressive for what it is). Next goal might be to make it run on some lower end devices. I don’t know how fast external servers are, but it might be fast if it’s only running a few calculations in parallel. I also don’t know how fast ray casts are in Roblox. I know it’s fast, but in this scale it could be a bottleneck, I am not sure.
These were some of the thoughts I was thinking about from this project and even my project.
