rt

Renderer/ray tracer test framework.

ℹ️ All commands in this readme assume CWD is the repository root.

Building and running

Prerequisites

• A C++20-capable compiler
• The meson build system
• A recent version of Python 3 (required by meson).

Linux

You may need to install a bunch of packages for x11 and sdl2, e.g.:

sudo apt install xorg-dev libx11-dev libgl1-mesa-glx libsdl2-dev

Creating a build directory

# windows with visual studio:
meson setup build --backend vs

# everything else:
meson setup build

Building

cd build && meson compile

Running

rt is a command-line application.

Usage: rt [--help] [--version] [--list] --scene <path> --renderer <name>

Renders a scene with a software renderer of your choosing.

Optional arguments:
  -h, --help      shows help message and exits
  -v, --version   prints version information and exits
  -l, --list      lists available renderers and exits
  -s, --scene     scene TOML file [nargs=0..1] [default: ""]
  -r, --renderer  renderer name [nargs=0..1] [default: "mg_ray_tracer"]

Available renderers are listed as part of the program's stdout during regular execution.

Misc

Redownloading subprojects

Downloading of the required subproject dependencies should happen for you automatically, but if it doesn't (or you wish to force a re-download/update):

meson subprojects download && meson subprojects update --reset

Switching between Debug and Release builds

The default build config is Release (highly-optimized but poor debugging experience). If you wish to change to debug:

cd build && meson configure --buildtype debug

Adding a new renderer

Renderers are intended to be self-contained in single .cpp files in src/renderers/. The general process for adding a new one is as follows:

1. Create your new renderer .cpp file in src/renderers/ (use one of the existing ones as a template if necessary)
2. Add the cpp file to the list in src/renderers/meson.build
3. Build and test

Regenerating SoA types

The struct-of-arrays types are generated using soagen. Their code files are already present in the repository so you won't need to do this, unless you wish to change them in some manner, in which case:

# initial soagen install
sudo pip3 install soagen

# regenerate files and update soagen.hpp
soagen src\soa.toml --install vendor