Captain's Log: Stardate 78203.4

Today I got the new rendering approach working on MacOS, using an NSView that hovers over the main editor window. It works just like on Windows, with the right click pop-up menu correctly displaying on top (via another NSView). I have fully weeded-out OpenGL from the app, using Vulkan on Windows and Metal on MacOS. That means that I'm no longer using any APIs that Apple has deprecated, which was a big blocker for releasing the production version of the app.

The renderer currently does all the camera operations correctly, so you can zoom, rotate, use orthographic views, etc, just like with the old renderer, and it all works. However none of the entities are displayed -- it just loads the "broken helmet" glTF demo model and displays it. The fact that I can now load and render arbitrary glTF models is wonderful, because it means that I can now hire an artist for the 3D assets and get them exactly how I want them. With my custom renderer this would have been a lot trickier, since the artist would have to understand my formats.

Next I need to convert all my existing .obj models to .glTF, load them in Filament, instance them, and translate/rotate them into their correct positions for display. The other thing I need to do is rework the parts of the GUI that hover over the 3D window, since that's no longer possible (except via native windows, which have to be square). Both of these things are fairly straightforward, but may take a bit of time to get right.

Now the bad news: running the renderer in Metal did not fix the MacOS audio performance issues. This means that there's something really funny happening, because when I run the app in headless mode for golden tests, it performs much better. And it still performs poorly in GUI mode even if I disable the 3D renderer entirely, so it's not the 3D graphics interfering with the audio. I'm thinking the OS may have some weird heuristics about what kinds of processes to prioritize for GPU compute. So this is still an open area of investigation.