Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
2020 has been a tough year for most of us personally, but a good year for
Godot development nonetheless with a huge amount of work done towards Godot
4.0 and great improvements backported to the long-lived 3.2 branch.
We've had close to 400 contributors to engine code this year, authoring near
7,000 commit! (And that's only for the `master` branch and for the engine code,
there's a lot more when counting docs, demos and other first-party repos.)
Here's to a great year 2021 for all Godot users 🎆
(cherry picked from commit b5334d14f7)
As a result of the GLES specifications being vague about best practice for how buffers should be used dynamically, different GPUs / platforms appear to have different preferences.
Mac in particular seems to have a number of problems in this area, and none of the rendering team uses Macs. So far we have relied on guesswork to choose the best usage, but in an attempt to pin this down, this PR begins to introduce manual selection of options for users to test their configurations.
Batching is mostly separated into a common template which can be used with multiple backends (GLES2 and GLES3 here). Only necessary specifics are in the backend files.
Batching is extended to cover more primitives.
Normal mapping previously took no account of rotation or flips in any path except the TEXTURE_RECT (uniform draw) method. This passed flips to the shader in uniforms.
In order to pass flips and rotations to the shader in batching and nvidia workaround, a per vertex attribute is required rather than a uniform. This introduces LIGHT_ANGLE which encodes both the rotation of a quad (vertex) and the horizontal and vertical flip.
In order to optionally store light angles in batching, we switch to using a 'unit' sized array which can be reused for different FVF types, as there is no need for a separate array for each FVF, as it is a waste of memory.
2d rendering is currently bottlenecked by drawing primitives one at a time, limiting OpenGL efficiency. This PR batches primitives and renders in fewer drawcalls, resulting in significant performance improvements. This also speeds up text rendering.
This PR batches across canvas items as well as within items.
The code dynamically chooses between a vertex format with and without color, depending on the input data for a frame, in order to optimize throughput and maximize batch size. It also adds an option to use glScissor to reduce fillrate in light passes.
