The Great Porting Adventure: Day 8

After a few days off, The Great Porting Adventure resumes!

The TODO list has reached equilibrium – new items are discovered at about the rate that I knock them off. I figure this is a good sign, since I’m getting a handle on the remaining work and the issues that do pop up are pretty minor. Porting is a bit of a grind though. I’d much rather be working on something new and exciting at this point. The novelty of seeing my game running a Mac has all but worn off and thus I didn’t spend much time on it this week.

I started by going through the list of things that I compiled out just to get the game running in the first place. The big one was the intro “studio logo” splash which was a screen with a bit of transition flair that shows up when the game starts and loads a bunch of assets behind the scenes. I had to basically rip this out at first because it was causing a crash somewhere in OpenGL, which was about two levels of framework lower than anything I understood.

Is my code broken? Or XNA? MonoGame? MonoMac? maccore? OpenGL?

I read into it a bit and it turns out that OpenGL does not like it when you use an OpenGLContext from a different thread. This was a straightforward fix (a MakeCurrentContext() in the right place in the worker thread) because my use case was pretty simple: main thread loads assets, worker thread updates and draws the logo animation. This fixed the crash, but rendering had some serious issues. The screen fade was functional, but debug text was popping in and out over top of it. The logo itself wasn’t showing up at all, even though it was drawn in a very similar way to the screen fade.

It would eventually be revealed that none of these issues were related to OpenGL nor my multi-threaded use of it.

I spent a while trying to figure this out and lamenting the lack of PIX. At one point in my debugging, I noticed that I was multiplying some Color values by an alpha that was outside [0,1]. This turns out to be a no-go in MonoGame. I didn’t look into it much (and I don’t have the source in front of me), but I’m guessing it has something to do with the packed value representation used for Color. Not sure – needs more investigation. Certainly not the source of problems I was expecting.

The inconsistent rendering order that was causing sporadic popping of components was due to the draw order not being respected in the Game class. Or rather, the implicit draw order based on the order you added components was not always being honored. I fixed this one by explicitly assigning a DrawOrder to my components, which fixed the sorting.

After a while wrestling with this, I realized that my loading scheme was really just overly complicated and kind of hacky. I had pulled it from a previous game that loaded a lot of things up front, but the use case for DLC Quest wasn’t the same. There was no need for a second thread, and there certainly was no reason that it should be calling Present() on the GraphicsDevice. I’m pretty sure it came from the NetRumble sample, but it still felt wrong to be circumventing the Game loop like that. At any rate, I ripped it out and switched to a much simpler “show logo animation, then press start screen, then load stuff” flow. Much better.

The fiddling continued as I worked to get rid of some “dirty frame” transitions. It seems like there are some cases where I need to clear the framebuffer that don’t crop up in the XNA version of the game. I’m not sure where the discrepancy stems from, but it was easy, cheap and pretty logical to add in a Clear in one or two places. One transition problem stemmed from my use of ResetElapsedTime() to avoid a hitch after spending a long frame loading content. This method isn’t implemented in MonoGame at the moment, but I didn’t dig deep enough to find out if MonoGame would try to “catch up” on long frames anyway. It was easier just to add a few more frames to smooth out the transition.

Oh, and SoundEffectInstance.Resume() was broken. But I fixed it.

I’ve also noticed that my game throws a bunch of errors on startup (possibly when loading Mono-related libs) that look a little like this:

DLCGame.Mac(3296,0xb0183000) malloc: *** error for object 0x253f1010: pointer being freed was not allocated

*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

I don’t think there’s a <sarcasm> tag powerful enough to say I’m looking forward to figuring that one out.

That’s about it for Day 8. It’s getting to the nitty-gritty and game-specific stuff now. Still haven’t looked at the Mac store requirements… one of these days…

Running total: 8 days, $112.87


The Great Porting Adventure: Day 4

Here be dragons

Back to work after a weekend off. I’ve started to get some good feedback from other devs who are curious about the porting process. It’s great to see some on Twitter deciding to give it a whirl too – it’s always easier when you have more eyes on something. It seems like most are content to follow along and see what happens first. Honestly, that’s a pretty smart approach since I have no idea if this is going to work in the end.

So, day four. This was easily the worst day so far.

At the end of day three, I had my game all converted and compiling, but anything beyond my first screen wasn’t drawing properly. In fact, it was initially crashing trying to apply a texture that was never set (and never needed to be applied anyway). I put a quick guard against using such a null texture to get things running, but it quickly became obvious that things were Not Right.

Specifically, everything except my menus and the background was not being drawn at all. It looked a bit like this:

You could technically play the game using the brown pixels under the "Y" in top left.

Upon (very) close inspection, I could see some tiny moving dots in the upper left corner of the screen. It seemed like anything I was drawing with just a vanilla “SpriteBatch.Draw()” call was working, but the rest of my game was tiny and offset. All of those draw calls used a more involved Draw override that included a SpriteSortMode as well as a BasicEffect argument. Now I had to figure out why those calls weren’t doing what I expected.

This is where I spent most of my day. Stepping through the MonoGame framework, trying to figure out what it was doing and then trying to figure out what it should be doing instead. This isn’t easy when you don’t know what “right” looks like.

Armed with Reflector and the StockEffects sample from AppHub, I dug through the internals of XNA’s SpriteBatch, BasicEffect and its associated shaders. MonoGame is not the line-for-line port of XNA that I expected. I’m guessing that’s for for legal reasons, but maybe it’s for technical reasons. I don’t know. I do know that the implementation MonoGame uses is incomplete though. This makes sense, since only 2D is supported at the moment whilst BasicEffect has a lot of 3D features.

Eventually, I found this in MonoGame’s implementation of one of BasicEffect’s vertex shaders:

gl_Position = gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix * gl_Vertex;

This was the first “Aha!” moment. Setting World/View/Projection on the BasicEffect modifies shader parameters, not built-in GLSL uniforms (by the way, did I mention I had to read up on OpenGL and GLSL?). This is why setting my own values had no effect! I therefore changed it to this:

gl_Position = gl_Vertex * WorldViewProj;

In the above, “WorldViewProj” is a uniform that is set by BasicEffect. Note that the order of multiplication is switched because matrices in XNA are row-major, whereas OpenGL uses the column-major convention. I think.

Compile, run….

No change.

Since I don’t really know what I’m doing, I played around with various different matrix values and shaders for a while with no luck. I would receive runtime errors whenever the shaders failed to compile or link, so I foolishly assumed they were working. I began to suspect something was seriously wrong when I modified the pixel shader to just return the color red and yet the textures were still drawn. Something was definitely not behaving as I expected. Whenever problems like this come up in the AppHub forums, the answer is invariably, “Have you tried PIX?”. I should look into some sort of PIX alternative – it would have saved me a lot of time.

It took a lot of investigation, stepping through code, and reading up on OpenGL to determine that although the shader program was being constructed, compiled, linked, set, etc properly, it was also subsequently being unset just before the actual draw OpenGL call happened. Argh! I used the following call to inspect what shader program was active in order to figure that out:

GL.GetInteger(GetPName.CurrentProgram, out programNum)

Since “programNum” came back zero, I knew OpenGL was using the fixed function pipeline and not BasicEffect’s shaders. It was easy enough to track down where the erroneous call to GL.UseProgam(0) was and resolve that.

With the shaders now actually being used, I was able to work my way back from “all red pixel shader” to a properly functioning BasicEffect, complete with World/View/Projection matrices. Drumroll…

DLC Quest on a Mac! Now with actual gameplay!

Yay! In-game!

That’s actually skipping ahead a bit, but I figured you deserved a picture after all that rendering rambling.

I had to do a bit more work to enable SpriteBatch tinting, but that was rendering solved for today. There were a few more issues though.

First off, a lot of my data (awardments, DLC pack definitions, etc) was not being loaded at all. It turned out to be my use of the ContentManifest, which is a sample from the AppHub. In a nutshell, the ContentManifest is an asset that builds a list of all the assets in your Content project at build time. The result is a list of filenames that you can read at runtime to iterate through the built files. I use this to facilitate a data-driven approach to things like awardments – I just drop an awardment .xml file in my content project and it will be loaded by the AwardmentManager automagically.

However, since all content is built on Windows, those filenames use the Windows file separator (“\”). When I read them at runtime on a Mac, they still have the (now incorrect) Windows separator and thus parsing them using something like Path.GetDirectoryName doesn’t work. I added a little fixup routine for the slashes and that was that.

The last problem was that everything was falling through the world.

This came as a bit of a surprise. How could that be platform dependent? Maybe a floating point precision difference? I was perplexed, and certainly not looking forward to debugging my core collision library.

I disabled gravity and glided my character around the world, only to find that collision worked just fine against vertical surfaces. I then added a toggle to gravity so I could turn it back on at runtime easily, which let me run and jump properly, but only if gravity was initially disabled. That was a hint that something was going wrong on the first frame.

Turns out that my physics step function took a “float deltaTime”, but made no checks that the delta was a reasonable duration. The first frame of my game was unusually long on Mac and thus all of the objects were simply tunneling through the ground on the first update. Whoopsie. I updated the function to chew through multiples of 1/60 sec rather than just whatever the deltaTime was and then things were back to normal.

This has been a super long update, but it was a long and frustrating day for the most part. Being able to run around my game and interact with things is a great reward though, so I’m thoroughly motivated to press on. There’s still a lot to do though. There seems to be some precision problem with collision after all, as entities are a bit jittery on the ground. Audio is still missing. I haven’t even tried the part of my game that uses render targets. Controller support is untested. Keybinding is an unknown. The list goes on.

And yet, I’m happy with my progress 🙂

Stepping outside your programmer comfort zone is how you become a better programmer. I’ve definitely got that first bit down.

Running total: 4 days, $112.87