Validation layers revealed 9965 VkSamplers allocated against a device
limit of 4000 — every VkTexture created its own sampler even when
configurations were identical. This exhausted NVIDIA's sampler pool
and caused intermittent SIGSEGV in vkCmdBeginRenderPass.
Add a thread-safe sampler cache in VkContext that deduplicates samplers
by FNV-1a hash of all 14 VkSamplerCreateInfo fields. All texture,
render target, renderer, water, and loading screen sampler creation
now goes through getOrCreateSampler(). Textures set ownsSampler_=false
so shared samplers aren't double-freed.
Also auto-disable anisotropy in the cache when the physical device
doesn't support the samplerAnisotropy feature, fixing the validation
error VUID-VkSamplerCreateInfo-anisotropyEnable-01070.
Add setZoneName() to LoadingScreen and display the map name from Map.dbc
as large gold text with drop shadow above the progress bar. Shown in both
render() and renderOverlay() paths. Zone name is resolved from gameHandler's
getMapName(mapId) during world load. Improves feedback during zone transitions.
- Normal map CPU work (luminance→blur→Sobel) moved to background threads,
main thread only does GPU upload (~1-2ms vs 15-22ms per texture)
- Load screen warmup now waits until ALL spawn/equipment/gameobject queues
are drained before transitioning (prevents naked character, NPC pop-in)
- Exit condition: min 2s + 5 consecutive empty iterations, hard cap 15s
- Equipment queue processes 8 items per warmup iteration instead of 1
- Added LoadingScreen::renderOverlay() for future world-behind-loading use
Recreate Vulkan swapchain in LoadingScreen::render() when the dirty flag
is set, so resizing the window during world loading no longer renders
into a stale swapchain with mismatched framebuffers.
- Use authoritative playerRace/playerGender at spawn for voice profiles
instead of unreliable model name parsing
- Support nonbinary gender with useFemaleModel body type fallback
- Move voice setup into spawnPlayerCharacter() for all spawn paths
- Remove legacy single-player default Human Male clip preloading
- Make loading screen text black and move progress bar to top
Replace all glGenTextures/glTexImage2D calls in UI code with Vulkan texture
uploads via new VkContext::uploadImGuiTexture() helper. This fixes segfaults
from calling OpenGL functions without a GL context (null GLEW function pointers).
- Add uploadImGuiTexture() to VkContext with staging buffer upload pattern
- Convert game_screen, inventory_screen, spellbook_screen, talent_screen
from GLuint/GL calls to VkDescriptorSet/Vulkan uploads
- Fix loading_screen clearValueCount (was 1, needs 2 or 3 for MSAA)
Online world entry now shows a progress bar during character model,
terrain, and tile streaming. Fixed loading screen crash from calling
ImGui::NewFrame while a frame was already in progress. Log file is
now truncated on each launch instead of appending.
- Add loading screen system with stb_image for JPEG loading
- Two loading screen images (orc and dwarf) randomly selected
- Display loading screen while terrain data loads
- Cache WMO inverse matrices to reduce per-frame computation
- Stub WMO liquid rendering (needs coordinate system fix)
- Update spawn point to Stormwind Trade District
