godot-lportal/INSTRUCTIONS.md

LPortal Instructions

LPortal is a portal rendering system for Godot 3.2. It may compile with 3.1, but this is untested / supported.

About

One of the most requested features for Godot 3 has been occlusion culling (in some form). It is on the roadmap to be added to the core of the engine in Godot 4.0, but until that is available, I figured that I could come up with an interrim solution that would allow the production of some of the games that need this.

There are several approaches to occlusion culling, but one of the oldest and tried and tested techniques is the use of rooms (or 'cells') and portals. Portal rendering is particularly useful in indoor scenes, especially 1st / 3rd person games. It is not so useful in outdoor scenes. There was some support for portal rendering in Godot 2 but I have implemented this new system from scratch. Portal rendering was particularly attractive as an interrim solution partly because it is easier to integrate with the existing engine, and partly because I have done it before(!).

There is a simple explanation here of the concept:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xgb-ZcZV9s

Goals

• Easy to use
• Easy to iterate levels (re-exporting full levels from e.g. blender after editing)
• Fast (good algorithms, no dynamic allocation and cache friendly)

As with most room portal systems, LPortal works better if rooms are convex. Most portal systems require you to specify the convex hull (bound) for each room. In LPortal this is optional. The convex hull is only required for calculating the 'start room' of a dynamic object when you either initially place it (dob_register), or teleport it (dob_teleport). As such, both of these functions have an alternative hint version where the user can specify the start room manually. This is possible in some simpler designs of games, and avoids the laborious need to model room bounds (convex hulls).

If you are exclusively using the hint commands, and not creating bounds, there is strictly speaking no longer a requirement for the rooms to be convex, they can be concave shapes. This allows considerable flexibility in level design. HOWEVER, the portals should be placed such that no portal is in front of the portal plane of another portal in the room. I.e. the portals themselves should form some kind of convex structure.

The details

The first thing you may notice is that LPortal doesn't make much use of special features within the editor, and simply relies on careful naming of spatials (or Empties within Blender). There is one new node type, 'LRoomManager', which behaves pretty much as any spatial however it has some added functions and runs an entire visibility system under the hood.

The reason for not creating bespoke editing within Godot is twofold:

1. This is a non-official plugin to the engine, without modifying core, or creating a specific importer
2. Using the node names to denote rooms and portals allows the whole level to be edited (and more importantly re-edited) within a modelling package such as blender.*

*Note that although the whole game level can be created in the modelling package, this is optional, you can also create it in the Godot editor.

The room manager

Within your scene graph, to use LPortal you should add an LRoomManager node to the scene, e.g. as a child of the root node. You can reuse the same room manager as you load multiple game levels. The rooms themselves should all be created as children of a spatial (you can use any name), this I will refer to as the room list (node). To avoid problems the room list should only have rooms as children. There is one more step, in the IDE you should assign the roomlist to the 'rooms' property of the LRoomManager, to tell it where the rooms are.

Rooms

Rooms are simply spatials, whose children should contain the mesh instances that are static (non-moving) within the room. The naming of the room spatial is crucial in order for it to be recognised. All rooms should start with 'room_'. e.g.:

• room_kitchen
• room_hall
• room_bathroom1

You can use any character within the name (except '*', that is reserved, see the portal naming).

Portals

In order to calculate the visibility between rooms (and the objects within rooms) you need to manually specify the location and shape of portals that should join the rooms. These should be thought of as doorways, or windows between rooms (and often cover exactly these features).

Portals are mesh instances, but have very strict requirements, and again naming conventions.

• Each portal should be a single-sided CONVEX polygon, on a single plane.
• The portal should be a child of the room it links from.
• Single-sided means it can only be seen from one direction. It should face out from the room it is a child of.
• You only need to create one portal per opening between rooms, rather than one in each room.

The mirror portal will be created automatically. This saves on editing in the modelling package. You can create the portal in either of the adjoining rooms.

• The name of all portals must start with 'portal_' followed by the name of the room (not including the 'room_' prefix) that the portal should link to. e.g. 'portal_kitchen', 'portal_hall', 'portal_bathroom1'

Portal naming

There is a special case for naming portals - because Godot cannot handle more than one node with the same name!

If you had several portals named 'portal_kitchen', Godot would not allow it, and would add characters to the name, and screw up the system. To get around this, and allow unique names for each portal, LPortal will ignore anything in the portal name after a '*' character. e.g.:

• portal_kitchen*0
• portal_kitchen*from_the_hall
• portal_kitchen*it_is_sunny_today

You get the idea, you can use whatever scheme you want to make the name unique. Something like using the room the portal comes from, and a number is probably sensible, e.g. 'portal_kitchen*hall0' but it is totally up to you.

Room Bounds

When you first add an object to a room at runtime, it has to decide which room it should be in.

You have three choices here:

1. Manually supply the convex hull (bound) for a room
2. Do not supply a bound, in which case LPortal will simply choose the nearest room centre to the object. (this can choose the wrong room when rooms are different sizes, for instance a hallway by a large room, so it is not recommended)
3. Use the dob_register_hint and teleport_hint versions, where the user specifies the start room

Approach (1) is the most powerful and flexible, but requires creating a bound, either in your modelling package or within Godot IDE.

The bound should be stored as a MeshInstance child of the room, with a specific naming convention, it should start with the prefix 'bound_'. You can put anything after the prefix (or leave as is).

Although the bound will be treated as a convex hull at runtime, you don't have to be perfect when creating it because the geometry will be run through the quickhull algorithm.

Ignore objects

You can optionally prevent objects being added to LPortal internal room system (so they will not be culled to the planes). To do this, their name should begin with 'ignore_'. Note this is only relevant for objects derived from VisualInstance, LPortal ignores all non-visual instance objects. However note that these objects will still be culled when entire rooms are hidden by LPortal (?is this still true?).

DOBs (Dynamic objects)

While most of the world in the room portal is assumed to be static (non-moving), you will inevitably want some objects to move around in the scene. These objects that can move between rooms are special, the visibility system has to keep track of which room they are in in order to render them correctly.

Players, boxes, props, physics objects are all examples of candidates for DOBs, as well as the most crucial example, the camera itself. Unless the visibility system knows which room the camera is in, the system will not know what to render! We will use the camera as an example as you will need to register this as a DOB.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, all DOBs should be maintained in your game OUTSIDE the room list subtree. I.e., NOT in a room. This is because the relationship between the DOB and the room is a soft one, the DOB can move between rooms. This is also handy because it makes it easier to use things like pools for your dynamic objects, because you don't have to worry about them being in different rooms in different places in the scene graph.

All the following functions should be called on the LRoomManager node.

• Call dob_register(cam, 0.0) to register a DOB to be handled

The number 0.0 is the radius of the DOB in the visibility system. All DOBs are managed as spheres. For a camera the radius can be zero because it will never be visible (however it DOES require to be a DOB so that the system can keep track of which room it is in).

If a DOB is being culled (popping out of view) when it should not, it is normally because the bounding radius needs to be larger. On the other hand, too large a radius will make the DOB render when it is not necessary, so it is a good idea to tweak this value. It is in Godot world units, so you may be able to simply measure you object in the IDE.

• Each frame, call dob_update(cam) to keep that DOB updated in the system

If the DOB is not moving, or you want to deactivate it to save processing, simply don't call update again until you want to reactivate it.

• When you have finished with a DOB you should call dob_unregister(cam) to remove the soft link from the system. This is more important when you are creating and deleting DOBs (say with multiple game levels). If you call rooms_release when unloading a level and want to keep DOBs in between levels, it is crucial that you do not update them until you have re-registered them after calling rooms_convert to create the new level (you will get an error message otherwise).

• If you are suddenly moving a DOB a large distance (rather than into a neighbouring room), you should call dob_teleport(cam). This uses a different system to estimate the new room that the DOB is in. If you know in advance what room the dob will teleport to, there is a hint version of the function.

• DOBs should only move between rooms via the portals. In fact that is how their movement between rooms is defined. This is why a room's portals should form a convex space, never concave. In order to limit movement between rooms to the portals, you should use e.g. physics, or a navmesh.

Conversion

Build your rooms and portals and placed them as children in a scene graph structure something like this:

Root
  LRoomManager
  MyRoomList
    room_kitchen
      MeshInstance (table?)
      MeshInstance (walls?)
      MeshInstance (floor, ceiling)
      MeshInstance (chair?)
      portal_hall
    room_hall
      MeshInstance (painting?)
      MeshInstance (floor, ceiling)
  MyDOBs
    Camera
    Player
    Monster
    Box
  AnythingElse

• Ensure that you have assigned the roomlist to the rooms property in the LRoomManager (either in the IDE or in script)

• At startup / when you load the level, call rooms_convert()

This will provide some output to indicate the building of the optimized internal visibility structure.

• Set which camera you want LPortal to use by calling rooms_set_camera(cam)

• Register the camera as a DOB (see above section on DOBs) and update each frame.

• If you want to unload a level and load a new one, call rooms_release(), free the old level, load the new one, and call rooms_convert() again (which clears the old data), and repeat each step.

Be aware that if you unload (using queue_free) and load levels with the same name then Godot can rename them to avoid name conflicts. The nodepath to the rooms assigned to the LRoomManager must be correct!

Lighting

Introduction

Although deciding what is in view of the camera is relatively straightforward, what complicates matters is that objects in view may be lit by lights that are not in view. Even worse, objects in view may be shadowed by objects that are NOT in view!

Realtime lighting

Godot's realtime lighting works using shadow mapping, that is, before rendering the view from the camera, it first renders the view from each light affecting the scene, drawing each object to a shadow map. During the camera render it then uses the shadow map (or maps) to determine which pixels are in shadow.

It should be obvious that this is potentially very expensive, both the extra steps to render from each light, and the lookup at runtime to determine whether pixels are in shadow. As a result, realtime shadows are not a good option on some low powered devices.

If we cull our visible objects using LPortal but still render all objects when rendering the shadow maps from each light, we would be missing out on a lot of the benefits of our rooms / portal system. Due to this, I have made considerable effort to allow LPortal to cull not only the objects in view of the camera, but also to cull objects that are in view of the lights, and ONLY those lights that are relevant to the visible scene (a game level may contain 100 lights, but if only 2 are lighting the current view, those are the only 2 that are needed).

This is still a work in progress and there are some limitations. There are 3 light types in Godot :

1. Directional Lights (global)
2. Spotlights (local)
3. Omni lights (local)

Directional lights such as the sun are great for lighting an entire level, but naively, they cast shadows from EVERY object in the level. Rendering the shadow map can be very expensive. Of far more interest in LPortal (for now) are the local lights, because they offer good opportunities for culling, both of the light itself, and of the shadow casters.

For now, if you place static spotlights within the rooms, they will be detected during conversion and used for realtime lighting with culling. Omni lights will be available soon via the same method. Directional lights I haven't come up with a good solution yet, I am working on this. You should place directional lights outside the room list somewhere else in the scene graph and register the light with LPortal by calling register_light, and it will do its best to cull shadow casters but this is still a work in progress.

Baked Lighting

Often a far better fit for lighting with occlusion culling systems is the use of baked lighting, such as lightmaps. Lightmaps can store the entire static lighting for a level in precalculated form, as one or more textures, called lightmaps. This has pros and cons.

Pros

• Lightmaps are pre-calculated ahead of time, so can use far more complex and realistic models of lighting than would be possible in realtime. Techniques such as radiosity, and multiple bounces of light rays are possible.
• Lightmaps are very fast at runtime. There is no need to render a shadow map for each light, and when rendering from the camera, instead of an expensive lookup into shadow maps, simple texture mapping can be used to lookup the lightmap texture. As such they can produce fantastic lighting even on low powered machines such as mobile phones. This is the reason many of the first action 3d games used lightmaps, such as early quake and unreal.

Cons

• Lightmaps are limited in what kind of lighting information they store. Classical lightmaps only store the diffuse component of the lighting, and ignore the specular component. There are some more complex types of lightmaps but only the diffuse type is directly supported in Godot so far.
• Lightmaps only deal with static lighting. As the lighting is baked it gives a snapshot of lighting in one particular arrangement. If you want moving lights, or lights that change in brightness, you will need to either use other techniques or combine them with lightmapping. (One way of getting some simple variation is to bake more than one lightmap for a level, then blend the lightmaps on each frame prior to rendering, however this feature is not standard in Godot)
• Another big consequence of lightmaps being static is they don't show shadows for moving objects. This can be acceptable for the best performance on low end machines, but in practice, many games combine lightmaps with other techniques to get some kind of shadows on moving objects.

This may mean using lightmapping in combination with traditional realtime lighting, but for example, only rendering dynamic objects to the shadow maps. You can also render the realtime lighting as normal for all objects, but only put indirect lighting into the lightmaps. This gives some increase in visual quality compared to fully realtime lighting but does not help performance wise.

Using Baked Lighting with LPortal

Notes

• The most involved step is building your original rooms and portals, and getting the names right. Watch the debug output in the console when converting the rooms, it will let you know or give indications where it is having trouble converting.
• You can use hierarchies of nodes to place your static MeshInstances within a room, so it is easier to place groups e.g.:

room_office
  Desk (spatial)
    Table (mesh instance)
    Chair (mesh instance)

Debugging

A significant portion of LPortal is devoted to debugging, as without feedback it is difficult to diagnose problems that are occurring. The debugging occurs in 2 stages - the initial conversion, and at runtime, it will provide the visibility tree when you request debug output for a frame with rooms_log_frame().

A sample conversion is as follows:

running convert
Convert_Rooms
Convert_Room : room_myroom_x0y0
		Found VI : WallsAndFloor
		Found VI : Box
		Found VI : Box2
			myroom_x0y0 centre 0, 1, 0
Convert_Room : room_myroom_x1y0
		Found VI : WallsAndFloor
		Found VI : Box
		Found VI : Box2
			myroom_x1y0 centre 4, 1, 0
Convert_Room : room_myroom_x0y1
		Found VI : WallsAndFloor
		Found VI : Box
		Found VI : Box2
			myroom_x0y1 centre 0, 1, 4
Convert_Room : room_myroom_x1y1
		Found VI : WallsAndFloor
		Found VI : Box
		Found VI : Box2
			myroom_x1y1 centre 4, 1, 4
Convert_Portals pass 0

DETECT_PORTALS from room myroom_x0y0
	detected to myroom_x0y1
	detected to myroom_x1y0
	detected to myroom_x1y0
DETECT_PORTALS from room myroom_x1y0
	detected to myroom_x1y1
	detected to myroom_x2y0
	WARNING : portal to room myroom_x2y0, room not found
	detected to myroom_x2y0
	WARNING : portal to room myroom_x2y0, room not found
DETECT_PORTALS from room myroom_x0y1
	detected to myroom_x0y2
	WARNING : portal to room myroom_x0y2, room not found
	detected to myroom_x1y1
	detected to myroom_x1y1
DETECT_PORTALS from room myroom_x1y1
	detected to myroom_x1y2
	WARNING : portal to room myroom_x1y2, room not found
	detected to myroom_x2y1
	WARNING : portal to room myroom_x2y1, room not found
	detected to myroom_x2y1
	WARNING : portal to room myroom_x2y1, room not found
Convert_Portals pass 1

MAKE_PORTALS_TWOWAY from room myroom_x0y0
	contains 3 portals
	considering portal myroom_x0y1
		creating opposite portal
	considering portal myroom_x1y0
		creating opposite portal
	considering portal myroom_x1y0
		creating opposite portal
MAKE_PORTALS_TWOWAY from room myroom_x1y0
	contains 3 portals
	considering portal myroom_x1y1
		creating opposite portal
	considering portal myroom_x0y0
		is MIRROR, ignoring
	considering portal myroom_x0y0
		is MIRROR, ignoring
MAKE_PORTALS_TWOWAY from room myroom_x0y1
	contains 3 portals
	considering portal myroom_x1y1
		creating opposite portal
	considering portal myroom_x1y1
		creating opposite portal
	considering portal myroom_x0y0
		is MIRROR, ignoring
MAKE_PORTALS_TWOWAY from room myroom_x1y1
	contains 3 portals
	considering portal myroom_x1y0
		is MIRROR, ignoring
	considering portal myroom_x0y1
		is MIRROR, ignoring
	considering portal myroom_x0y1
		is MIRROR, ignoring
Convert_Portals pass 2

	CONVERT_BOUND : 'bound_ofroom' for room 'myroom_x0y0'
			contained 6 planes.
	CONVERT_BOUND : 'bound_ofroom' for room 'myroom_x1y0'
			contained 6 planes.
	CONVERT_BOUND : 'bound_ofroom' for room 'myroom_x0y1'
			contained 6 planes.
	CONVERT_BOUND : 'bound_ofroom' for room 'myroom_x1y1'
			contained 6 planes.

You can see that conversion takes place in several stages:

1. Finding the rooms and visual instances (meshes etc)
2. Detecting portal meshes
3. Making portals two way
4. Detecting room bounds

(Note that if you are reading the log in the Godot IDE you may need to bump up the value of network/limits/debugger_stdout/max_chars_per_second in the project settings, to prevent getting an output overflow message)

A sample visibility tree for a frame is as follows:

FRAME 172

ROOM 'myroom_x0y0' planes 6 portals 3
	DOB Camera2 culled
	PORTAL 0 (0) myroom_x0y1 normal 0, -0, 1
	
	ROOM 'myroom_x0y1' planes 10 portals 3
		DOB @Monster@4 culled
		PORTAL 0 (6) myroom_x1y1 normal 1, -0, -0
			Outside plane 0.996257, 0, -0.086442, 0
			CULLED (outside planes)
		PORTAL 1 (7) myroom_x1y1 normal 1, -0, -0
			Outside plane 0.996257, 0, -0.086442, 0
			CULLED (outside planes)
		PORTAL 2 (8) myroom_x0y0 normal 0, 0, -1
			CULLED (wrong direction)
	PORTAL 1 (1) myroom_x1y0 normal 1, -0, -0
		Outside plane 0.996257, 0, -0.086442, 0
		CULLED (outside planes)
	PORTAL 2 (2) myroom_x1y0 normal 1, -0, -0
		Outside plane 0.996257, 0, -0.086442, 0
		CULLED (outside planes)

Visibility starts from the room the camera is in, checks the objects within against the clipping planes (just the view frustum at first), then checks each portal to see if it is visible. If it is visible it checks the room on the other side of the portal, and continues the process recursively. Each time it moves through a portal it adds clipping planes from the camera to the edges of the portal. This ensures that objects that are hidden by portal planes are not rendered.

You can show the portal culling graphically by calling rooms_set_debug_planes(true), and show the room bounds (if defined) by calling rooms_set_debug_bounds(true).

Getting maximum performance

LPortal is very efficient, and the culling process itself is only likely to be a bottleneck if you are creating too high a density of portals.

Portal polygons with fewer edges are also faster to cull against. So usually an axis aligned quad will make a lot of sense, even when covering an irregular opening (say a cave).

Level design is a balancing act:

1. More objects cull more effectively
2. Fewer objects result in fewer draw calls (which can be a bottleneck)

Command reference

• rooms_convert() - prepare lportal for rendering

• rooms_set_camera() - set which camera visibility is calculated from

• Node * rooms_get_room() - returns godot room node from lportal room id

• rooms_set_active() - turns on and off lportal

• rooms_log_frame() - output debug logs for the next frame

• rooms_set_logging() - set debug logging level, 0 - 6 (0 is none, 6 is most)

• rooms_set_debug_planes() - turns on and off graphic debugging of portal planes

• rooms_set_debug_bounds() - turns on and off graphic debugging of room bounds

• dob_register() - have lportal find start room

• dob_register_hint() - user provides start room

• dob_unregister()

• int dob_update() - returns room ID within

• dob_teleport() - have lportal find start room

• dob_teleport_hint() - user provides start room

• int dob_get_room_id() - return room ID the dob is currently within