This is the documentation for Enlighten.

High Level Build System

Owned by Nathan Hunter (Unlicensed)
Oct 31, 2024
2 min read

The High Level Build System (HLBS) provides an easy and flexible way to drive the precompute. This is a suite of programs that allows you to:

  • Specify the scene contents in a single XML file.
  • Control the parameters used in each system of the precompute.
  • Run a single command to build all the precompute stages.

The HLBS contains more than the bare feature requirements of the precompute, such as convert TGA textures to DDS, etc. As these processes are simply groundwork for any application using 3D models, they are not discussed here.

GeoRadiosity runs the HLBS when you click Precompute.

Launching the HLBS

To launch the HLBS, call either GeoPrecompute.exe or GeoPrecompMonitor.exe.

GeoPrecompute.exe /t:Precompute /p:InputScene="<path>\ubox_2sys_SH\ubox_2sys_SH.scene"

To take advantage of incremental builds, when you export the Enlighten scene, for each file you write:

  1. Write the content of the file to a temporary buffer.
  2. If the file already exists on disk, load the existing file.
  3. If the existing file is identical to the temporary buffer, don't write the file to disk.

For more information, see Building with the HLBS.

GeoPrecompMonitor.exe /t:Precompute /p:InputScene="<path>\ubox_2sys_SH\ubox_2sys_SH.scene"

GeoPrecompMonitor.exe produces the same output but displays a dialog, showing colour-coded precompute progress and log information.

  • Green indicates success.
  • Blue indicates the task in progress.
  • Yellow indicates a warning.
  • Red indicates an error.

The build system launches many child processes. If you kill the precompute process, make sure you kill all the child processes.

Unix platforms

GeoPrecompute is a .NET application, which is supported on MacOS and Linux via the Mono runtime. These applications are not native to the platform, so the command line becomes:

mono GeoPrecompute.exe /t:Precompute /p:InputScene="<path>/ubox_2sys_SH/ubox_2sys_SH.scene"

The GeoPrecompMonitor application is written with a windowing library not yet available under Mono, and so is unavailable on these platforms.

The recommended version of Mono is 4.0.x. Earlier versions mostly work but will cause an XML validation failure whenever GeoPrecompute is invoked with the /p:ParamSetFileOverride command-line parameter due to a bug with validating xs:anyURI fields.

Optional parameters

/p:IncludeSampleFrameworkSteps=true

Generates additional debug files that are used by GeoRadiosity. Specify this parameter if you wish to view your scene immediately in GeoRadiosity without having to perform a precompute in GeoRadiosity.

For more information, see GeoRadiosity-Specific Data.

/p:IncludeDebugDataSteps=true

Generates visualisation data. Specify this parameter if you wish to view your scene immediately in GeoRadiosity without having to perform a precompute in GeoRadiosity, or if you wish to implement your own debug visualisations.

For more information, see Debugging the precompute.

/p:IncludeMobileTargets

Generates NEON specific runtime data, necessary for mobile/ARM targets (iOS, Android etc).

/p:MaxHeapSize

The percentage of physical system memory to be used by the distributed precompute tasks. If a precompute step needs more than this amount of memory, it will fail with an error message, and you should attempt to simplify the affected system. If omitted the default value of 105 (i.e. 105%) will be used. Set to 0 to disable the functionality.