Graphic artifacts while using NSprites

[Antoshidza]

Most devs I've communicate with about using NSprites use Age-of-Sprites or at least NSprites-Foundation. Sometimes I receive messages from devs about really weird artifacts which happens differently. Maybe some of this issues was inside system's incorrect way of managing data and those are fixed today, but most of them don't. Here I want to list my and other devs experience of facing artifacts.

What those artifacts looks like?

The very common thing in all cases is that we see complete mess of sprite's properties. In most cases sprites get rendered with completely invalid properties like inverted UVs with huge scale and such properties don't exist on any sprite at all.

What I think it might be

• It could be that NSprites somewhere misses dependency and at some framerate we get sprites with semi-written properties values.
• It could be that RenderArchetype code somewhere sync data in a wrong way and messed up rarely
• It also could be some common graphics bugs which appear depending on what render pipeline used or when in frame graphics calls happen.

Cases

Constantly glitch from @filod

forum link

@yokobe0012 also encounters this error but he says that it doesn't happen in build.

From our discord conversation with @filod it appears to solve with enabling VSync in game view window.

Glitch caused by opening random editor windows

This happens only on with me. I see absolutely same thing as @filod but it happens sometimes when I open / close some editor windows and especially Profiler window. Also it happens if I disable systems through Systems window (also solved by VSync).

Flickering in build from @nullmastermind (discord)

video
The problem was that SpriteFrustumCullingSystem was perform wrong. If it was disabled all was great in build. I can't be sure that wasn't just system wrong data managing, but it was very weird to see it only on certain device.

This error was fixed by any of two approaches

• Turn off culling system (which means that was a root of a problem)
• Set Application.targetFrameRate to 30 from 300 (those device was 60fps support). So it seems error highly depend on frame rate - with high framerate we get issue.

Also moving culling system to PresentationSystemGroup have stable situation a bit, but flickering still persist. It is also odd because SimulationSystemGroup and PresentationSystemGroup should be updated same times and form just a update sequence.

Conclusion

If your are one of this people or you have any ideas / details / anything to say then please share information with us!

[Antoshidza]

My little research pointing that during schedule jobs in RenderingSystem there is missed dependency.

[Antoshidza]

Also I've figured out that it happens only with Reactive and Static properties. EachUpdate properties avoid this artifacts.

So it might be wrong deps with reading those properties, which I guess isn't possible, because there are multiple sync points between simulation systems group and SpriteRenderingSystem. So I guess it should be wrong deps with writing indices (Pointer Property)

[Antoshidza]

I see such a message in console (not an error just a message)
LockBufferForWrite: Multiple uploads in flight for buffer 000001D6F3433030 (bufferHandle: 530) of size 603256. Falling back to slow path. LockBufferForWrite() should be called only once per frame on D3D11.
At the same moment artifacts appear, so I guess it is related.

Can't find helpful information about this messages nor any wrong code. If anyone knows about it, pls comment.

[Antoshidza]

It seems that graphic artifacts are related to used Graphics API, so I've described compatibility in this page on project's wiki