DEVLOG 16 - Blank Window, Draw Calls & More

 
The last ten hours have been very productive. As the devlog title suggests, I managed to get the classic black window, completed the code for draw calls, and also accomplished many other things.
 
Draw Calls Commands
I then completed the code for making draw calls with a simple mesh, integrating all the logic into the Render Graph. If you want to send any command to the GPU—a draw call, a copy, a dispatch, or anything else—it must necessarily go through the Render Graph. This allows me to have a central entity that can manage barriers and commands in a highly optimized, precise, and secure manner. When you want to draw something, you must declare a graphics pass. This pass has methods to execute the drawing commands, but it also has methods to set things like the texture depth/stencil to use, the target texture to draw on, etc. You can also have multiple color targets, as long as they have the same resolution.
 
Blank Window
Since I haven’t seen any tangible results on screen for a while, only code, I tried displaying a black window and then initializing the engine. The new context, window, and swapchain builders all work. The Resource Mapper, the class that manages the global descriptor set, also works. Testing the other classes will require a bit more work until I’ve got all the missing pieces, but it’s almost there.
 
Persistent Resources Support
Since creating a mesh also involves creating data and sending it to the GPU via buffers, I need a way to upload data from the CPU to the GPU. Mesh buffers are persistent, not transient. Currently, in the Render Graph code, I only had support for copying and uploading transient resources. From now on, this is also available for Persistent resources, as I’ve written the same code for them as well. I also implemented barrier generation for persistent resources so that synchronization is handled internally by the Render Graph, as with transient resources.
 
New Resource Handles
Up until now, each resource has been represented as a handle corresponding to an unsigned 32-bit number. From now on, resources are represented by two unsigned 32-bit numbers: one for the previously existing identification number and a generation number. By combining both numbers, each resource is unique, thus eliminating the possibility that if a resource is destroyed and recreated with the same ID, it could be mistaken for an older resource that no longer exists.
 
Project Cleaning
I finally cleaned up the project a bit and made it a bit more organized by dividing the files into more specific subfolders.