(This is not that much of a feature suggestion but a development support request, please move the thread to a correct subforum in case there is one that's more fitting.)
Me and a friend of mine are currently developing an AI research platform similar to ViZDoom but with a C++ interface and one based on GZDoom. In similar fashion to ViZDoom, the plan is to implement an interface based on the cycle of [ assign an action ] -> [ update the game state ] -> [ fetch game state (such as the pixel buffer, player status, etc.) ] -> [ repeat ]. As the game won't be played by a human and we want to be able to run the game with highest framerate possible, we don't have use for the game window. Furthermore, we would like to use as much of the GPU horsepower for AI as possible and utilize software rendering instead.
So the plan is to remove all SDL / OpenGL -related features and build a custom interface like described above. Work on this is currently well underway: we can already provide actions as inputs and have the pixel buffer communicated back as an output. We also found out that the GZDoom's truecolor software renderer is very flexible and relatively easy to modify (I already implemented depth rendering using it), so we'd very much like to use it instead of renderers in other doom source ports.
Now the only hurdle we really hit the wall with is the status bar / HUD rendering. Apparently it's completely implemented with hardware rendering, even when software renderer is used for the 3D scene. Now after a couple of days of hacking attempts and comparisons with the old ZDoom source code, I've found out that there are still remnants of the old status bar rendering code present in the code base but they're apparently unused. (I might be speaking out of my ass here as the code is somewhat.. convoluted.)
So my question is that is it possible to render the HUD / status bar with software only? If not, could it be achievable with relatively little amount of work (that is, retrofitting the old renderer code from ZDoom isn't an option for example - during my darkest moments I gave that a try too
)? If it is, would you be able to provide a couple of pointers how I might want to go about this? So far I managed to reutilize the DSBarInfo::_Draw by wrapping the StatusBar and SBarInfoScript[SCRIPT_CUSTOM] to a DSBarInfo object, but for some reason the script object doesn't contain any draw commands (commands buffer in SBarInfoCommandFlowControl is empty and only contains NULL values).Thanks!
