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XenkoByteSized

Intended as a sort of dumping ground for various small samples of using Xenko to do various things, like procedurally generate meshes.

Project is currently on Xenko 3.1.0.1-beta02-0752.

XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.TetrahedronMesh

A simple example of creating a mesh procedurally by supplying vertices, also calculates normals automatically. Can be observed in the scene that loads when you open the project aside from the source itself.

Uses only a vertex buffer to be as simple as possible.

tetrahedra

XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.Cubemesh

Another example of creating a mesh procedurally, in this case with with an index buffer and instead for a cube (as it makes sense finally to use an index buffer here)

24 vertices, 36 indices.

cube

XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.SubdividedPlaneMesh

A somewhat less simple example of expanding upon the above, generates a subdivided plane with a configurable width, height and number of subdivisions in each quadrant.

Uses a HeightfieldColliderShape for collision, somewhat absurdly calculates this from the mesh data rather than deriving the mesh data from the heightmap data, but alas.. It works well enough here.

Still does not use any index buffer, probably should.

Has some basic operations possible like:

(scrollwheel to change marker radius for terrain)

Can also be observed in the same scene

terrain

XenkoByteSized.SplitScreen

A fixed size splitscreen example, with the view being split up in left and right and rendered by different cameras.

This one is slightly harder to simply link to some code to illustrate, you'll want to explore the following to see whats going on:

The scene itself: splitscreen

A relevant piece of the compositor setup, where the default CameraRenderer at the root has been replaced by a SceneRenderCollection, as can be seen in this page on the Xenko Docs about render targets.

compositor

Misc Considerations

Of the most important bits to consider here are:

XenkoByteSized.TriggerScene - DoorScript

A small two room scene that uses a trigger volume to show/hide a door and enable/disable its collider so the player can pass through. Also comes with a PlayerController set up with a simple capsule collider so you can walk around in the small scene.

The scene itself is composed entirely out of primitives.

(might revisit this to make the door not just pop out of existence)

trigger scene

XenkoByteSized.VehicleScene - VehicleScript

A small scene using rigid bodies together with constraints to create a small vehicle composed of a solid block and 4 cylinders connected to the block with a Generic6DofConstraint for each cylinder, each constraint limited in rotation such that each cylinder only rotates like you might expect a wheel attached to an axle act.

So we get a vehicle that can roll on these cylinders!

To understand this sample I recommend experimenting with it, changing the type of constraint and adjusting limits etc.

(will probably revisit this to let the front wheels turn)

vehicle scene

XenkoByteSized.ProceduralMesh.CombinedMeshes - Shader: MultiMeshShader

So this is a sample of using streamout/transform feedback [1] [2] to render a lot of geometry at once.

To be precise, in our case it's 4096 cubes.

How does it work? In a few steps.

  1. With a small custom render pipeline and our shader we render without a pixel/fragment shader with DrawIndexedInstanced in order to do our "instancing", which in fact only outputs our transformed geometry to another buffer (our stream out buffer: streamOutBufferBinding) n number of times, where n is how many separate instances we want to render.
  2. We take the ModelComponent + Mesh that we have Xenko-side and set its MeshDraw's vertex buffer to be our newly created streamout buffer (which we also flagged as a vertexbuffer). At this point we're in business!

In our example we haven't given any thought to multiple materials, or materials at all for that matter, but for each involved entity there is a unique transform that is applied, and now also a unique colour thanks to tebjan as you can see in the shader.

Note that this probably only works on DX11 (maybe DX12) box scene

Misc

The sample also switches out the graphics compositor to the one associated with the scene being switched to currently, currently only relevant for the SplitScreen sample.