Upgrade engine to v2 (Part 1 of upgrade)

[TimoGuy]

• Merges in all changes to v1 engine in https://github.com/TimoGuy/ewu_oct_2023_gamejam project.

• Strips out use of exceptions.

• Creates action-based input system.

• Improves/stabilizes transform and physics calculations being shared with render and simulation threads.

  • NOTE the use of atomics

• Creates Material Editor

  • Loads in SPIR-V into a material base data structure
  • Uses material derivatives to define parameters for the material base
  • Includes simple material previewer/editor

• Creates Texture Cooker

  • Takes recipe files and a texture pool to cook textures into .ktx filetype
  • Includes half-mixer (texture pre-cooker that can add and swizzle color channels)

• Improves hotswap loader

  • Includes job stage dependencies.
  • E.g.: new texture gets added which needs to get cooked, then needs to get loaded into the texture map set and update the materials that use it.

• Improves texture map

  • Now uses Vulkan Extension called Descriptor Indexing
  • Allows use of dynamic amount of texture/samplers without having to specify the amount in the shader file and the descriptor

• Improves iteration time

  • Compile times (8-12sec -> 2-4sec)
  • Implemented a PCH (precompiled header)
  • Cleaned up #includes
  • Startup times (~15sec -> ~5sec) (Debug mode)
  • Switched from Nlohmann's JSON lib to RapidJSON
  • Created Model animation data structure serializer to remove JSON accessor counts (by about 85% for Slimegirl model)
    • NOTE: this means that animation data is simply stored as a binary file that deserializes into the data structure for VkglTFModel.h/.cpp

• New RenderObject and Material bucketing system

  • Takes all render objects, splits them into material-corresponded meshes, and buckets them.
  • Bucketing takes <1ms

• Compute Skinning system

  • Easier helper functions for getting a shader running.
  • Of course created compute shader counterparts for these.
  • Combines all bucketed skinning meshes into a giant, single mesh.
  • NOTE: this is currently the biggest bottleneck. It can take up to 30ms to do this!
  • All vertices are skinned and evaluated into an output buffer corresponding to the current frame's framedata.
  • Skinned vertices are drawn as if they're static meshes.
  • No more branching in the vertex shaders!

• Compute Frustum Culling system

  • Calculates bounding spheres on a render-object-wide level.
  • Uses spheres on each mesh (a render object's model could have up to 20 meshes, so this is an optimization area for sure) to perform compute culling.
  • Writes indirect draw commands and count buffer for later draw (Made possible with Vulkan 1.2)

• Spawn point editor

  • Instead of saving where the player is, now the editor allows developer to choose a spawn location and start a playtest

• Improves object placement

  • Instead of instantiating objects at 0,0,0 the developer is prompted to click at a spot where they would like to create the object from the palette.

• Adds profiler (Tracy)

  • Implemented basic GPU and CPU profiling.
  • Already used it to fix a few bugs.