Texture Splatmap Generation

Release 0.8.9

Enabling splatmap generation in SuperDemo+

In this release we enable the pipeline for texture splatmap generation and it can be visualised during runtime. We will be focusing on applying the texture according to the splatmap and parameter tweaking later.

• Setup external texture loading which takes place in a new sub-class STPWorldSplattingAgent in STPWorldManager in the demo program.
  • Setup texture loading and texture database in this new sub-class.
• Augment STPTextureStorage in the demo program for smart texture memory management.
• Enable parallel texture loading from file system in STPSkyRenderer and STPWorldManager.
• Add STPCommonGenerator.cu in the demo program as a data holder for RTC, allowing all generator scripts to be linked as a single program.

SuperTerrain+ Texture Definition Language

• Introduce TDL as a handy custom script for defining texture splatting rules.
• Refactor the lexer and parser with error handling improvement.
• Add a new exception type STPInvalidSyntax for any lexing and parsing error.
• Fix a problem of calling front() from an empty std::string_view. This is because neither std::string nor std::string_view includes null terminator.

General fixes and improvement

• Eliminate unused texture type when generating texture information in STPTextureFactory.
• Remove __constant__ qualifier for contant values in STPSimplexNoise device kernel.
• Refactor all runtime compilers and merge all of them into a single linkable program in STPCommonCompiler.
• Change rehash() to reserve() for std::unordered_map used in STPTextureFactory.
• Improve robustness of STPSingleHistogramFilter, the last working thread will guarantee to finish all remaining tasks if the texture dimension is not divisible by degree of concurrency. Change the threading strategy so STPSingleHistogramFilter is now thread safe and results in better concurrency with less waiting. Remove critical section in the demo program when calling histogram filter.
• Move Exception to SuperTerrain+ root directory.
• Refactor functions to attach inherited object and remove unused functions from STPWorldManager.
• Fix an incorrectly set launch configuration in STPSplatmapGenerator.
• Resolve #28 by completely removing stream callback to deallocate host memory for STPFreeSlipTextureBuffer and STPBiomefieldGenerator. It's now simply done using a stream sync call.