The Standard Frame

What it is#

!StandardFrame is a compositor node that stands for a whole frame. At build time it expands into the same node graph a hand-authored document would contain — the resources with their extents, the stages with their caster settings, the passes in their one workable order, and every seat/publisher pair spelled out — so a project's entire frame document can be:

The knobs are semantic on purpose: they say what the game wants, never how the frame is wired. At full knobs the expansion is sample 13's Frame.vxcompositor; at none it is a sky, an opaque pass and a tonemap. quality: selects a tier of the numeric sub-knobs (cascade resolutions, probe budgets, march steps, tap counts) through the render-quality waterfall: engine defaults, then the project's RenderQuality.vxpreset on PostEffectFactory.Preset, then an inline preset: on the node itself, folded per parameter. A document that writes no quality: takes the platform's pick — GraphicsOptions.Quality, handed through CompositorBuilder.Quality — which is what a settings screen switches without editing the document.

The one knob the expansion does not read is look: — the project's artistic base, a look profile. The emitted post nodes stay neutral whatever it says; the look reaches them at run time through the volume fold, so editing it relights the same expanded document with nothing rebuilt.

What it is for#

The compositor document is the most honest frame format there is — nothing renders that the file does not say — and for exactly that reason it is unusable as a *default*: sample 13's document is eleven hundred lines, and the audit that preceded doc 39 catalogued what those lines cost even their own authors. The Standard Frame is the default path: the invariants the audit paid for (atlas extents from the nodes' own arithmetic, load actions that respect the sky, the TAA-before-fog ordering, seat lines that match compose slots) are encoded once, in engine code, under test. Authoring stays for those who opt in, and the expansion produces the same object model authoring produces — one builder, one node registry, no second pipeline.

Using it#

Register the effect-set factory, which a project using any post effect already does — the factory implements the builder's document-transform seam, so registering it is the whole installation:

Two facts stay the host's, exactly as they do for a hand-authored frame:

1. Caster stages are extraction's. With shadows: on, add "Shadow" to GraphicsOptions.CasterStages; with antialiasing: Taa or TaaFxaa, add "Motion" too. A frame document cannot decide what an object is extracted as. 2. The ambient split is the material's. gi: above Off emits the split targets and the ambient combine, which pay off when the shading pass runs with ForwardPlus.SplitOutputs on.

The extensions: lists are the three seams a project's own nodes splice into without forking the frame: afterOpaque (after the Main pass, sharing its depth), beforePost (lighting is whole, nothing post has run), beforeUi (after the output resource is written). The expansion's resource names are sample 13's canonical ones — SceneHdr, SceneDepth, ShadowAtlas — and a document may declare its own resources beside the node; redeclaring a canonical name *differently* is refused by name at build time.

Ejecting: vixen frame explode#

The escape hatch, when the knobs stop being enough:

It replaces the !StandardFrame node with the fully expanded document — every resource with its extent, every stage with its caster state, every seat line — and the text carries a comment per declaration saying why it exists and what its neighbours rely on, generated from the same prose the expansion encodes. One-way, deliberately: the file says so at the top, and from then on it is a hand-authored document like sample 13's. The exploded text is sparse — a member equal to its record's default is not written — and it round-trips: reading it back binds a structurally identical asset, so what the ejected file builds is exactly what the knobs built.

The pieces are reusable on their own: PostEffectFactory.Transform(document, out var notes) is the expansion plus the comments, and CompositorWriter.Write(asset, notes, header) is the text — the same pair the editor's explode button will drive.

Examples#

A frame for a stylised game with no GI and no meter, plus one custom full-screen pass:

Expanding in code — what the builder does internally, and what a test asserts against:

See also#

• Choosing a frame — the decision this node is half of: knobs first,
• explode for surgery, hand-author only when the frame itself is the subject.
• The post-processing node kinds — every node the expansion emits, and the
• ordering rules it encodes.
• Shadow maps for the sun and the lamps — what shadows: Cascades unfolds into.
• Turning on dynamic global illumination — what gi: Probes unfolds into, and the
• host slots it needs to do more than nothing.
• docs/plan/39-standard-frame-and-render-presets.md — the design, and the incumbents it answers.