Progress Update - March 2020 W03 (Patreon)

Hey all!

I'm happy to say I've got Source 2 maps up and running, although it once again took me a bit longer than planned. On the plus side, the lightmaps work as well, and they're a looker!

I took the opportunity to revamp the entire map format for Pragma, the map geometry is now stored as separate model files, which is going to make importing/exporting (e.g. from/to Blender) much easier.

I'll still have to look into a few issues with the Source 2 materials, since they come out slightly incorrect in Cycles:

I've also added an actor catalog to the interface now, which works similarly to the model catalog. You can just drag and drop an actor of a specific type (like a light source) into the scene with immediate feedback. It's still a work-in-progress, but you can sort of see it in action in the video. There's a few more new features, but those aren't quite ready to be shown off yet :).

In other news, Khronos has added official real-time Ray Tracing support to Vulkan!

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/ray-tracing-comes-to-the-vulkan-api-officially-with-new-extensions-new-nvidia-vulkan-beta-out.16233 

It's currently still in beta, but this is something I've been waiting for for a while now! I've actually implemented my own real-time raytracer a couple of months ago, but it was mostly a prototype and extremely performance-intensive: https://youtu.be/akmWCA_Hvmw

Their implementation takes care of most of the heavy lifting, so it's definitely something I'd like to implement in the future. Once it's out of beta and AMD has added driver support for it, I'll make sure to look into it and keep you posted!

I still need to do some code cleanup, but the next update should be ready before the release of Half-Life: Alyx! I'll add an update channel to the Discord server to make it easier to keep track of future updates, too.

Anyway, I hope everyone is staying safe and taking care of themselves! It's a bit of a tangent, but in light of the current world-wide situation, I'd like to make a quick mention of a program called "Folding@Home": https://foldingathome.org/ 

By installing this program, you're giving up a small portion of your available computing power for various research projects in the fight against diseases like Cancer, Alzheimers, and as of recently COVID-19. Your PC (or SmartPhone/etc.) becomes part of a global, distributed super-computer, which is used for highly computationally expensive simulations of protein dynamics, which can lead to new treatments for these diseases. If you're interested, you can find more information about the COVID-19 sub-project here: https://foldingathome.org/2020/02/27/foldinghome-takes-up-the-fight-against-covid-19-2019-ncov/ 

You can set it up to only use resources while your PC is idling, in which case you'd likely never even notice it, and it goes a long way towards helping these researchers out :).