Unity GPU Noise 1.3 Released!

As you can tell from the title, I've been able to release several updates for GPU Noise since my last post.

I borrowed a MacBook from one of my friends and installed Unity on it.  That allowed me to quickly port all of the noise functions to GLSL and ensure they all worked on Mac.  However, I was still having issues with the noise functions on my Android devices.  Unity on Android is actually incredibly unhelpful in this regard.  It doesn't report any errors or anything. The shader simply fails and runs a fallback shader.

I decided to create a WebGL test page using the same GLSL code since WebGL uses OpenGL ES 2.0 (the same as mobile devices).  I quickly found out (and remembered, as I've posted about this in the past) that OpenGL ES doesn't allow variables in for loop expressions.  It must be a constant expression (i.e. loop a fixed number of times). I made a mobile port of my GLSL noise that forced all summation functions (fBm, Turbulence, and Ridged) to loop 8 times.  Even though this changed allowed the code to work properly in WebGL, it was still not working on Android.

I then took a different direction and tried writing a straight Java test app for Android.  I found out there is a major bug where Android won't report the shader compilation errors.  It just gives you an empty string.  Not very helpful.  I managed to get the shader to compile, but I ran into more OpenGL issues due to mismatched vertex attributes.  I cast aside the example in frustration.

Someone who purchased a copy of GPU Noise let me know that Xcode on Mac actually reports shader compilation errors, so I begged a coworker of mine who has a Mac, Unity, and an iOS developer license to give it a try.  As soon as he deployed it to his iPad, we saw the error that has been eluding me this entire time.  There was a "Uniform precision mismatch" with some of my variables.  I did some investigation and found out that vertex shaders in GLSL default to high precision while pixel shaders default to medium.  I hard coded my vertex shaders to use medium precision and now almost all of my functions work on Android!  I say almost because all of the Voronoi 3D Displacement functions seem to peg out the CPU (as before) and cause the device to freeze and crash.  I think they're just too resource intensive to use on current mobile devices (they work on Windows and Mac just fine).  At least the 2D Animated Voronoi functions all work on Android.

Related to an earlier post, I still need to figure out why a Tegra 3 sucks so much.  It's not just speed, but also the rendering quality.  Here are a few comparisons for example.

EVO 3D

Transformer Prime

EVO 3D

Transformer Prime

As you can see, the Transformer Prime looks horrendous!  I'm not sure what's causing such terrible visual artifacts.  Hopefully someone online has an idea.

Until next time...

Unity GPU Noise 1.0 Released!

GPU Noise has finally been released on the Unity Asset Store!  Check it out here!

As you can tell from all of the past posts, this has been a long road.  It's still not perfect though.  It works great on Windows, but the reviewers let me know that it has some issues on Macs.  I borrowed my friend's Mac for a little bit and found out that the issue is most likely due to the cross compiler that Unity uses to convert Cg code into GLSL. (It was creating multiple variables with the same name.)

I decided to directly port the Cg code to GLSL, but it's been a rough process since the Windows version of Unity doesn't compile GLSL at all.  This means that you don't get any errors or feedback at all to let you know if you wrote some code incorrectly.  I had to write code, deploy to my Android phone, see if it works, and repeat.  Over and over and over.  Painful.  I'm thinking about picking up a cheap Mac (gasp!) just to have something that can compile GLSL code and give me feedback.  I'm hoping porting to GLSL fixes the problems on Mac, but I have no way to know for certain until I actually do it.

As usual, I'll be tracking my progress here.

Unity GPU Noise (Part 5)

And somehow 9 months have passed...

To be honest, I had a lot going on in my life since my last post.  My development laptop got stolen, my work laptop's hard drive failed, and other, more personal, things happened, which I won't get into.  As a result of the theft, I lost some of my work.  Not too much, just a week or two, but enough to make me unmotivated to return to my project and do the same work again.

About a week ago, I decided to finally dive back into it all.  I installed the latest Unity on my desktop and dusted off my old USB flash drive with the old copy of GPU Noise on it.  I decided to redo almost everything in the project to base it off of the texture-less implementations of noise in order to make it as easy and cross-platform as possible to implement in Unity (and hand off to other developers).

It was pretty smooth going, for the most part.  Based on my prior experience, I knew what I was doing.  The only big problem I ran into was trying to port mod from GLSL over to Cg.  I first used fmod in Cg, but that made the results all messed up.  I finally found this answer that explains the problem and how to fix it.  Once I implemented my own mod function in the same manner as GLSL's, everything was fine again.

Regarding the Android front, I'm not sure if it was something that got fixed in the Cg compiler between Unity versions, but all of my noise functions seemed to run on Android, for the most part.  The only issue I ran into is when I tried doing the 3D Voronoi displacement, the functions consumed too much processing and crashed the device.  This is because the displacement example has to call the function twice, which is a lot of processing.

Another Android "issue" I had was the performance of my devices.  I have an HTC EVO 3D and an ASUS Transformer Prime.  My EVO got about 47 FPS running the simple Perlin displacement.  I assumed the Transformer Prime would do better, but it only got 9 FPS.  Apparently the Adreno 220 outperforms the Tegra 3.  I ran some other benchmarks which came to the same conclusion.  I even looked at the Unity SystemInfo objects on both devices and I was really surprised to see the that Transformer Prime only has 61 MB of video memory while the EVO 3D has 216 MB.  I was greatly disappointed to see how poorly my Tegra 3 tablet performed.  I'll continue to investigate the issue in order to see if there's something I can do to improve its performance.

Just tonight I finally submitted my GPU Noise project to the Unity Asset Store.  If all goes well, it should be appearing on the store in a week or less.  Here's hoping!

Check out the latest demo!

Until next time!