Removal of WebGLDeferredRenderer?

[mrdoob]

WebGLDeferredRenderer is currently unmaintained and broken. Unless someone steps in and manages to fix it I think I'll have to remove it...

Any takers?

[bhouston]

I think we can add WebGLDeferredRenderer features to WebGLRenderer via multiple passes and with WebGL 2.0's ability to have multiple outputs per render. Thus I won't miss it. I'd rather focus on just one WebGL renderer than splitting effort across multiple.

[mrdoob]

Agreed! Considering that you were the only person that was trying to maintain it, I think I'll go for it.

[GGAlanSmithee]

I see this issue got closed, but out of interest, do you know if there is any ETA on WebGL 2.0? Hard to find any concrete info about it.

[mrdoob]

I think they're aiming for end of the year.

[GGAlanSmithee]

Cool, not so long, thanks.

[titansoftime]

With WebGL 2.0 comes the possibility for occlusion culling yes? Super looking forward to that, though I have no idea about the complexity of implementation.

[takahirox]

I've been trying to fix and clean up WebGLDeferredRenderer lately.

http://takahirox.github.io/three.js.deferredrendering/examples/webgldeferred_animation.html

https://github.com/takahirox/three.js/blob/WebGLDeferredRenderer/examples/js/renderers/WebGLDeferredRenderer.js

Are you still interested to recover WebGLDeferredRenderer?
I think it isn't too bad to recover it so far even if we rewrite with WebGL 2.0.
I'll send PR once I'll have done if it's good to you guys.

[mrdoob]

Recovering it sounds good to me!
The reason it got removed was because no one was maintaining it.

[takahirox]

I see. I'll try to make PR soon! :D

[bhouston]

@takahirox very nice. BTW try to reuse the existing packing.glsl functions and add your additional ones to this file: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/dev/src/renderers/shaders/ShaderChunk/packing.glsl Less duplication of code will make WebGLDeferredRenderer easier to maintain.

[bhouston]

We should probably also try to unify the lighting calculations between deferred and the forward renderer, like pulling stuff out of here: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/dev/src/renderers/shaders/ShaderChunk/lights_pars.glsl And you can probably directly re-use the brdfs: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/dev/src/renderers/shaders/ShaderChunk/bsdfs.glsl

[takahirox]

Agreed!

[jhm-ciberman]

Does the WwebGLDeferredRenderer actually works? I'm trying to use it for a game with a lot of lights but it doesn't seems to work. It still deprecated/unmantained?

[Mugen87]

The renderer is used in the following official example (which seems to work without any issues):

https://threejs.org/examples/webgldeferred_animation

[jhm-ciberman]

I want to move the discussion here. It seems that is a bug with the WebGLDeferredRenderer: https://discourse.threejs.org/t/performance-when-handling-large-number-of-lights-in-a-city-game/

[Mugen87]

Sorry , but you have not proven a bug yet.

If there is actually a problem with the renderer, we can open a new issue.