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  v0.16.0 Pre-release

  orkun released this 2026-09-15 19:43:08 +02:00 | 868 commits to main since this release

  v0.16.0 — 2026-09-15

  Features

  • A loading screen can show the renderer's start-up as it happens. r3d_open(w, h, title) opens
    the window and the graphics backend with nothing baked, and r3d_load_count() / r3d_load_step(i)
    run the rest - the sky and its light, the terrain, the shadow and screen targets, the scattered cover
    and actors, the grass - one step at a time, so a game can draw and present a frame between them.
    r3d_init is those same calls in a row and is unchanged for everything that uses it.

  • HDR10 output on the Vulkan renderer — r3d_hdr(on) asks for an ST 2084 / BT.2020 swapchain where the
    display offers one.

    The tonemap's HDR10 variant keeps the SDR picture up to a 200-nit paper white and rolls highlights on to
    1000 nits; the overlay converts the interface to the same white; HDR metadata is set where the loader has
    the command. The screen and LDR images are 10-bit while it is on, and screenshots refuse rather than write
    a PQ image as SDR. OpenGL and the Vulkan SDR frame are unchanged. R3D_HDR overrides the setting.

  • Mesh-shader grass — on a card with VK_EXT_mesh_shader, r3d_mesh_grass(on) draws each grass tile as one
    mesh-shader dispatch sized to that tile's blades, and a blade that is culled emits no vertices at all.

    • ludic-dev shaders — a variant whose first file is *.mesh compiles that stage as a Vulkan 1.3 mesh
      shader; its SPIR-V keeps the .vert name, so the manifest is unchanged.
    • The seam — gpu_has_mesh() and gpu_draw_mesh_tasks(x, y, z); a mesh program's pipeline has no
      vertex input and its bindings the mesh stage. The device enables meshShader and maintenance4.

    Not yet faster: at 4K on an RTX 3070 Ti the grass pass takes 5.0 ms against the chunked path's 1.7, so
    gpu_feature_implemented(GF_MESH_GRASS) stays false and a game should not offer it as a finished setting.

  • More of the renderer's quality is a switch a game can offer.

    • sky_set_quality(width): the prefiltered sky light at 256, 512 or 1024 wide (half as tall),
      baked again at once.
    • post_set_msaa(samples): 1, 2 or 4 samples for the scene on OpenGL, remaking the screen targets in
      place (post_msaa_live() is false on Vulkan, which has no sample counts yet); post_free now
      frees the multisampled framebuffer too.
    • STREAM_BUDGET_US is a variable: the microseconds a frame may spend generating streamed cover.
    • r3d_fog_scale: a multiplier over the fog density the daylight and the weather set.

  • NVIDIA DLSS super resolution and Reflex on the Vulkan renderer — through NVIDIA Streamline 2.14.1.

    • The loader — on Windows Vk.open() takes sl.interposer.dll beside the executable in place of
      vulkan-1.dll when a program asks (Vk.sl_prefer), falling back to plain Vulkan without it; the sl*
      exports and feature functions are reachable from Ludic.
    • render3d — r3d_dlss(mode) upscales the lit HDR frame before bloom and the tonemap, jittered on a
      Halton cycle, with preset K in every mode (the default M cost 18 ms a frame at 4K on an RTX 3070 Ti);
      r3d_dlss_render_w/h give the size to render at. r3d_reflex(mode) sleeps each frame and marks
      simulation, submit and present. R3D_DLSS, R3D_REFLEX, R3D_DLSS_PRESET, R3D_SL_LOG for tests.
    • Commands the interposer lacks — it exports no vkSetHdrMetadataEXT, vkCmdDrawMeshTasksEXT or
      acceleration-structure command; Vk.has checks one and vkGetDeviceProcAddr reaches it.

  • Real OS threads behind Job.* and Sync.* — Job.parallel_for runs work across every core.

    • fn name — an expression naming a top-level function as a value, for a worker's entry point.
      No closures: the data a worker needs is passed in.
    • Job.parallel_for(count, fn work, ctx) — work(i, ctx) for every i in [0, count), split
      into chunks across a worker pool (one thread per core but one, pthreads or Win32) and the calling
      thread; returns when all are done. Job.is_worker() says whether code is on a pool thread.
    • Sync.* is thread-safe — mutexes are real mutexes, atomics are compare-and-swap, channels are
      guarded, and Sync.cpu_count() reports the machine's cores.
    • A worker must not change the world — spawn and despawn on a pool thread stop the program with
      a located message.

  • Texture filtering and shadow resolution as settings a game can change while it runs.

    • r3d_set_anisotropy(level) sets the anisotropic filtering of every mipmapped texture already
      loaded, not only of later uploads, on OpenGL and Vulkan.
    • shadow_set_res(size) remakes the cascades' depth layers at 1024, 2048 or 4096 (shadow_res
      replaces the SHADOW_RES constant); the lighting reads the texel size from the map.

  • app native "<dir>" in package.ludic — ludic bundle on Windows copies that directory's files beside
    the executable: native libraries loaded at run time (NVIDIA Streamline's DLLs, say) and their licence texts,
    which cannot live in the pack.

  Fixes

  • The meadow's grass draws on the Vulkan renderer again — the chunked grass path uploaded its vec4 tile
    table with u_fv, which on Vulkan copies one float per array element, so every tile had no blades.
    u_f4v uploads arrays of vec4.

  Performance

  • The sky's light is baked once at start, not twice. A game that turns the sky at boot sets
    sky_start_yaw before r3d_init, and sky_load bakes the image-based light at that yaw; turning to
    a yaw the light is already baked at (sky_set_yaw) no longer bakes it again. Without it, nothing
    changes.

  Downloads

  • Source code (ZIP)
    1 download
  • Source code (TAR.GZ)
    1 download

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