Helion - C# (0.9.3.0 6/24 - Goodbye BSP tree rendering)

[invictius]

6 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

I mean just look at hobo's post stating hitting 1000+ FPS on Planisphere on a RTX 3070.

 

A ludicrous GPU like RTX 4090 may see even 2000 FPS or more.

 

What I meant was, how can you get 1500+ on anything.  I wasn't aware there was a fps cap as well as vsync.  500fps in map 1 on a gt 1030 and i7 870.  Apparently I could put my 1070 in this system to eliminate the bottleneck?

[Graf Zahl]

Logically the maximum frame rate depends on the graphics card being used. If you use a low end card you'll never get 1500 fps. The GT 1030 is rougly 1/10th as performant as a modern RTX card and that will show in the FPS.

 

 

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, invictius said:

 

What I meant was, how can you get 1500+ on anything.

With faster GPU's. Like i said Hobo gets 1000+ FPS on Planisphere 2 so i can imagine the cream of the crop like RTX 4090 will hit 2000+.

 

Lets be real here, these numbers are completely stupid. They would be handy for ultra slow-mo shots though

1 hour ago, invictius said:

  I wasn't aware there was a fps cap as well as vsync.  500fps in map 1 on a gt 1030 and i7 870.  Apparently I could put my 1070 in this system to eliminate the bottleneck?

If you hit 500 FPS already on MAP01 of Doom, then there isn't much bottleneck to begin with. I reckon Planisphere 2 would do well over 150 FPS on that card alone.

[invictius]

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

I reckon Planisphere 2 would do well over 150 FPS on that card alone.

Never saw it dip below 300 (1080p, default video settings)

 

Do we have a list of console commands?  As it was explained that this isn't a fork of any port, it's built from the ground up.

[hobomaster22]

1 hour ago, invictius said:

Never saw it dip below 300 (1080p, default video settings)

 

Do we have a list of console commands?  As it was explained that this isn't a fork of any port, it's built from the ground up.

Yeah, it's in the original post:
 

Quote

Console with searching and auto-complete features.
    Page Up/Page Down to scroll.
    'Commands' to view all commands.
    'Search [text]' to view all commands containing the search text.
    Press tab once will display all matching commands.
    Press tab on a completed command will display the documentation for the command.
    Double pressing tab will auto-complete.

You can look in the config.ini as well.

As far as maxing out the fps both render.vsync and render.maxfps need to be set to 0.

[invictius]

Would like to know what's causing this.  I3 5005u, intel hd 5500.  I suspect that the engine actually requires opengl 4.5/4.6 and the igpu only has 4.4.

 

[hobomaster22]

2 hours ago, invictius said:

Would like to know what's causing this.  I3 5005u, intel hd 5500.  I suspect that the engine actually requires opengl 4.5/4.6 and the igpu only has 4.4.

 

It's a logged issue with OpenTK and I found it a while back in Helion:
https://github.com/Helion-Engine/Helion/issues/329
 

Not sure why but most machines seem to get this installed in updates and others do not. You need the Visual C++ 2015 redistributable:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52685

[invictius]

On 4/7/2023 at 2:59 AM, hobomaster22 said:

It's a logged issue with OpenTK and I found it a while back in Helion:
https://github.com/Helion-Engine/Helion/issues/329
 

Not sure why but most machines seem to get this installed in updates and others do not. You need the Visual C++ 2015 redistributable:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52685

Now it just starts up, shows up in task manager but does nothing.  No window or anything.

 

On another low-end laptop, dotw.wad map 3 drops to 40fps.  That must be a new low!  Also, the cfg file says it's running at 1024x768 but I have it running in widescreen with no stretching?  And finally, is there a way to make the fps indicator a bit bigger?

Edited April 7, 2023 by invictius

[Arno]

On 4/6/2023 at 4:01 PM, invictius said:

I suspect that the engine actually requires opengl 4.5/4.6 and the igpu only has 4.4.

 

I was curious what would happen if Helion is started on a machine with a too low OpenGL version.

I tried it on my old 2nd generation Intel laptop (Intel B960) from 2011 with OpenGL 3.1.0.

 

It actually gives a pretty good error message:

Fatal error occurred OpenTK.Windowing.GraphicsLibraryFramework.GLFWException: WGL: OpenGL profile requested but WGL_ARB_create_context_profile is unavailable

 

[hobomaster22]

4 hours ago, invictius said:

Now it just starts up, shows up in task manager but does nothing.  No window or anything.

 

On another low-end laptop, dotw.wad map 3 drops to 40fps.  That must be a new low!  Also, the cfg file says it's running at 1024x768 but I have it running in widescreen with no stretching?  And finally, is there a way to make the fps indicator a bit bigger?

By default it will always take up the full dimensions. If you want to resize the dimensions with a different window size then you need to use set
window.virtual.enable and window.virtual.dimension. window.virtual.stretch will force it to stretch to the window dimensions if desired. Increasing hud.scale will scale up the hud.

[invictius]

On 4/1/2023 at 7:35 AM, Redneckerz said:

I got pretty good performance on a Intel HD 4600. Still a chunk more powerful than a Radeon 2400, but hey. Love to see the results, i do think that at that grade of hardware not even Helion can do an awful lot.

 

I do expect a chunk better than 7 FPS though considering.

 

After a lot of battling getting windows 10 onto a ssd (First ssd clapped out, second couldn't be gpt format, wasn't going to wipe it so got hold of another) I tried dotw on an e6600 and gt 210.  As low as 18fps in map 3, 16 on map 4 if I look up while approaching the castle, 42 on planisphere 2.  I'd have to jam a pentium 4 of pentium d in there to get lower fps, but only a select few support 64 bit windows 10.  And I'm not going to use windows 7 because figuring out why it isn't working is too frustrating.  On 10, all you have to do is install the redistributables. 

 

I hope a linux version is made because you can shove a linux install in any system and it just boots and adapts to your hardware.  I had gzdoom running on a p3-700 with linux and got 7fps on... the joy of mapping 4 hub, and headless chicken, I think?  (You probably haven't heard of the last wad, it's on the forum and it's pretty good)

[invictius]

On 4/8/2023 at 7:43 AM, hobomaster22 said:

By default it will always take up the full dimensions. If you want to resize the dimensions with a different window size then you need to use set
window.virtual.enable and window.virtual.dimension. window.virtual.stretch will force it to stretch to the window dimensions if desired. Increasing hud.scale will scale up the hud.

 

Since I can't get this to fall on its' knees even on a gt 210 and pentium 4, will cranking up the anisotropy and texture filter give me a 386-like level of performance?  My test system is disassembled, I'd prefer a guesstimate over reassembly just to find out.

[Martin Howe]

On 4/8/2023 at 3:37 AM, invictius said:

I hope a linux version is made ...

Indeed, and as I mentioned earlier: I understand it's not a priority, but it'd be nice to have eventually.

 

Hope the devs don't mind my asking, but what parts of Helion are Windows dependent?

Edited April 9, 2023 by Martin Howe

[hobomaster22]

21 minutes ago, Martin Howe said:

Indeed, and as I mentioned earlier: I understand it's not a priority, but it'd be nice to have eventually.

 

Hope the devs don't mind my asking, but what parts of Helion are Windows dependent? 

The main one is System.Drawing.Common. We both develop using Windows. Unfortunately, when the project was started Visual Studio didn't give you a warning if you used System.Drawing.Common which is very not obviously ONLY available on windows. It's used to convert doom images, fonts, etc. It could be changed to a third party library but currently would require a significant amount of work.

Part of Helion uses ImageSharp but these third party libraries suffer from the developers having nothing better to do than completely change the core functions so you have to rewrite your code, which has already happened. The small parts of Helion that use ImageSharp would need to be rewritten just by updating the ImageSharp library. May not happen again, but it's an annoyance for sure.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/core-libraries/6.0/system-drawing-common-windows-only

[Martin Howe]

Thanks. Such a pity; .NET is cross-platform these days, but much of what is needed to actually write programs with it isn't :(

 

I like .NET and C# but utterly hate Windows itself; it was good enough until Windows 8 came along and threw the UI under a bus, added adverts, intrusive questions, etc.; that's what finally pushed me to Linux.

[invictius]

Just ran dotw map 3 on an le 1660 (2.8ghz, low power mode am2 cpu) and gtx 1050 at 4k(!!!) and got about 18fps after waking all the monsters up.

[Gregor]

Just for convenience, is there a way to change key binds in the console?

[hobomaster22]

On 4/12/2023 at 11:08 PM, Gregor said:

Just for convenience, is there a way to change key binds in the console?

Currently no but I can look at adding it in the next release.

[hobomaster22]

0.9.1.4 Release

Long overdue but I have found some time to work on Helion again. There will be a follow up post with what is planned for the next release as well.

Spoiler

Implement UMAPINFO.
Implemented automap to show seen lines only. Can be toggled with render.automapbspthread.
Implmented chase camera mode. Can be toggled with the chasecam command. Game will automatically pause during normal play. If viewing a demo then game will continue playing as normal.
Implemented bind/unbind commands. Can be bound to keys or command. e.g: bind f7 "inventory.add shotgun"
Implemented missing Gib Health for dehacked.
Implement special activation debugging and automap marking with developer.debugspecials.
Implemented marking secret secrtors with developer.marksecrets.
Updated spectre rendering to look better at lower resolutions and has varying transparency to more match vanilla.
Fixed issue with Boom's generic locked door function.
Fixed mouse wheel that broke from OpenTK upgrade.
Add check for negative frame rotations that caused a crash.
Fixed ammo drop factor for skill levels.
Disabling mouse.look will automatically center the view.
Fixed missing HealthBonus lookup for dehacked.
Fixed issue causing source teleport sprite to be set to the floor.
Fixed weapon sway to sync with damage sectors.
Fixed issue that caused light changes to update the wrong texture.
Fixed Door special reuse when having tag.
Fixed clearing/changing instant kill sector changes through trigger specials.
Fixed light pulsate special to go out of min/max range to match vanilla.
Fixed rendering moving sectors with transfer heights.
Improved light change updates to not allocate specials to lower GC pressure.
Refactored some allocations for sector movement specials to lower GC pressure.
Fixed blockmap traversal issue that could include the same line twice.
Clear input commands on map start to prevent inputs carrying over from a previous level.
Fixed rendering flags for scrolling textures so the static texture is rendered when past max distance.
Fixed BEX parsing to check for optional equals sign.
Fixed BEX sounds to check for missing DS prefix.

 

[EpicTyphlosion]

On 5/28/2023 at 9:02 AM, hobomaster22 said:

0.9.1.4 Release

Long overdue but I have found some time to work on Helion again. There will be a follow up post with what is planned for the next release as well.

Seeing that framerate number along with the large amount of monsters puts a big smile on my face. Keep up the great work!

[PhoxFyre007]

The fact I have misses this port in the last year upsets me, because this is something wildly impressive. I see it says it has vanilla, boom. And mbf21 compat, but does it have mbf compat too?

[hobomaster22]

19 hours ago, PhoxFyre007 said:

The fact I have misses this port in the last year upsets me, because this is something wildly impressive. I see it says it has vanilla, boom. And mbf21 compat, but does it have mbf compat too?

Thanks. If by mbf compat you mean Boom specials then mostly yes. The only ones not implemented are colored sectors and bouncing off of walls from friction sectors. 

[Madgunner]

So sorry for the long delay, I've been knee deep in netcode programming the past couple months for my video game and I just finished it all within the last week. Anyways I finally got around to testing this on my other computer. It has a Nvidia P400 card in it which is a pretty dated card and wasn't even all that great when it first came out. I retested all four maps (Crazymaze, Planisphere 1 + 2, and Sunlust map 30), and I got a constant 60 fps which is absolutely amazing. This is some impressive stuff! I'm assuming there's some command I haven't enabled that removes the 60 fps cap. I have a GTX card also and if I can get it working I'll try that out too. I really can't wait to see where this port goes, because it definitely is groundbreaking for sure.

[hobomaster22]

6 hours ago, Madgunner said:

So sorry for the long delay, I've been knee deep in netcode programming the past couple months for my video game and I just finished it all within the last week. Anyways I finally got around to testing this on my other computer. It has a Nvidia P400 card in it which is a pretty dated card and wasn't even all that great when it first came out. I retested all four maps (Crazymaze, Planisphere 1 + 2, and Sunlust map 30), and I got a constant 60 fps which is absolutely amazing. This is some impressive stuff! I'm assuming there's some command I haven't enabled that removes the 60 fps cap. I have a GTX card also and if I can get it working I'll try that out too. I really can't wait to see where this port goes, because it definitely is groundbreaking for sure.

Nice! Yes you can remove the cap by setting render.vsync 0 and render.maxfps 0. Which GTX card is it? Pretty much any of them will fair very well. I have a GTX 970 which is hard to believe is nearing a decade old now. That old GTX 970 can push about 700fps for Sunlust MAP28 at 4k.

Some things we are working on for the next release:
System.Drawing has been removed so it should be able to compile on Linux. I don't have any machines to verify this on though since I have no use for it and run Windows on everything.

Geometry interpolation. This means dynamic changes to the map are no longer calculated every frame, only on the game tick. The main motivation for this is to make the rendering code a little more sane since sprites were interpolating, but map geometry could not which made for messy checks shotgunned around. As a bonus maps that move a large amount of sectors at once will keep a significantly higher average FPS.

A deep dive into what things are still allocating memory and causing garbage collection (thank you JetBrains dotMemory).

Reworking other main function routines that do not need to be processed every render frame to save more CPU processing.
 

Edited June 22, 2023 by hobomaster22

[Madgunner]

13 hours ago, hobomaster22 said:

Nice! Yes you can remove the cap by setting render.vsync 0 and render.maxfps 0. Which GTX card is it? Pretty much any of them will fair very well. I have a GTX 970 which is hard to believe is nearing a decade old now. That old GTX 970 can push about 700fps for Sunlust MAP28 at 4k.


 

Wow I don't how on earth that slipped my brain especially considering that my video game is the exact same way with the fps being capped at 60 when I enable vysnc. It is a GTX 570HD, but unfortunately it may be broken. Now that I upgraded that computer to win10 I'm going to try it one last time to see if it works, but when I had it on Windows 7, I got a message saying something was faulty with the card and windows was unable to recognize it. I'll re-test those maps tonight on the p400 card and see what I get, my guess is it'll get somewhere between 100-300 fps, as it's a fairly standard card.

 

Edit: So here's what I averaged:

 

230 fps crazymaze
250 fps planisphere
210 fps phanisphere2
140 fps sunlust map30

Edited June 23, 2023 by Madgunner

[hobomaster22]

On 6/22/2023 at 8:33 PM, Madgunner said:

Wow I don't how on earth that slipped my brain especially considering that my video game is the exact same way with the fps being capped at 60 when I enable vysnc. It is a GTX 570HD, but unfortunately it may be broken. Now that I upgraded that computer to win10 I'm going to try it one last time to see if it works, but when I had it on Windows 7, I got a message saying something was faulty with the card and windows was unable to recognize it. I'll re-test those maps tonight on the p400 card and see what I get, my guess is it'll get somewhere between 100-300 fps, as it's a fairly standard card.

 

Edit: So here's what I averaged:

 

230 fps crazymaze
250 fps planisphere
210 fps phanisphere2
140 fps sunlust map30

Pretty good numbers for such a dated card. I've finally been playing through Frozen Time since it's actually playable and I can easily stay at my 300fps cap without even stressing my RTX. Funny how a lot of these benchmark maps aren't really stress tests for Helion. After this next release I think the next feature will be UDMF. The 65k side limit isn't nearly enough to stress modern RTX cards. Then we can see what it takes to start tanking FPS in terms of map geometry.

[inkoalawetrust]

1 hour ago, hobomaster22 said:

Pretty good numbers for such a dated card. I've finally been playing through Frozen Time since it's actually playable and I can easily stay at my 300fps cap without even stressing my RTX. Funny how a lot of these benchmark maps aren't really stress tests for Helion. After this next release I think the next feature will be UDMF. The 65k side limit isn't nearly enough to stress modern RTX cards. Then we can see what it takes to start tanking FPS in terms of map geometry.

 

With how fast it is. I think it's unlikely to even see Helion dip below 60 FPS on like, a GTX 1060, until you start making maps that are the size of GTA 5's map.

[hobomaster22]

3 hours ago, inkoalawetrust said:

 

With how fast it is. I think it's unlikely to even see Helion dip below 60 FPS on like, a GTX 1060, until you start making maps that are the size of GTA 5's map.

Probably true. Going to need to copy paste Planisphere 2 a few times. Assuming it doesn't crash the editor first.

[darnogio]

Hello, i just want to share, maybe this will help

i try running nuts 3 with helion, got 27-40 fps  while all monster alive.
If i killed most imps near the tower, it will run on 50-60 fps before i die.

Running on my laptop with i5-11357g intel iris xe + 12GB RAM.
My screen resolution is 1920 x 1080.
The only config i change is HUD scale to 3

This is really cool, thanks for making this.
Gonna play some demanding wad with helion

 

[Darkcrafter07]

I got the very same specs laptop, eager to test

 

In the beginning it's around 208 fps

 

When monsters wake up it dips to 33 and goes to 45 and later to 50 and when it settles down to 80. Even with 80fps it has some microstutters and feels like 40 but playable.

 

I can't lower resolution and disable multisampling, maybe that could help it to gain some speed.

 

Btw, I noticed the same behavior as in gzdoom, it slows down dramatically when you look up and down, maybe it's up to the frustrum algorithm.

 

In the totally separated secret location it still lags as if no visibility checks were made at all.

 

Maybe you'd need to get some culling techniques other than bsp anyway like geometry occluders.

Edited July 4, 2023 by Darkcrafter07