Vulkan2D

Vulkan2D is a 2D renderer using Vulkan and SDL2 primarily for C games. VK2D aims for an extremely simple API, requiring no Vulkan experience to use. Astro and more recently Bedlam internally use Vulkan2D for rendering. My other projects Spacelink and Peace & Liberty also used Vulkan2D, although a much older version of it. Check out the quick-start guide.

Features

• Simple and intuitive API built on top of SDL
• Draw shapes/textures/3D models/arbitrary polygons to the screen or other textures
• Fast, built with Vulkan 1.2 and doesn't require any device features (but it can make use of some)
• Simple and fully-featured cameras, allowing for multiple concurrent cameras
• Powerful and very simple shader interface
• Simple access to the Vulkan implementation through VK2D/VulkanInterface.h
• Hardware-accelerated 2D light and shadows
• Easily load multiple resources in the background while your application gets prepared

Documentation

Every file in VK2D is properly documented for doxygen, run doxygen in Vulkan2D/ or check the header files. Additionally, there is a few miscellaneous pieces of documentation, quick-start and cameras. As a general overview,

Usage

There are two parts to building it with your project: you must build VK2D and also VMA since VK2D needs VMA to function. You'll likely need to do something like this in CMake:

set(VMA_FILES VK2D/VulkanMemoryAllocator/src/vk_mem_alloc.h VK2D/VulkanMemoryAllocator/src/VmaUsage.cpp)
file(GLOB VK2D_FILES VK2D/VK2D/*.c)
...
include_directories(... Vulkan2D/ VulkanMemoryAllocator/src/)
add_executable(... ${VK2D_FILES} ${VMA_FILES})

Vulkan2D also requires the following external dependencies:

SDL2, 2.0+
Vulkan 1.2+
C11 + C standard library
C++17 (VMA uses C++17)

Example

Using the renderer is quite simple, but there are some things to be aware of. For the sake of brevity, error checking is removed from the following example

SDL_Window *window = SDL_CreateWindow("VK2D", SDL_WINDOWPOS_CENTERED, SDL_WINDOWPOS_CENTERED, WINDOW_WIDTH, WINDOW_HEIGHT, SDL_WINDOW_VULKAN);
SDL_Event e;
VK2DRendererConfig config = {VK2D_MSAA_32X, VK2D_SCREEN_MODE_TRIPLE_BUFFER, VK2D_FILTER_TYPE_NEAREST};
vk2dRendererInit(window, config, NULL);
vec4 clearColour;
vk2dColourHex(clearColour, "#59d9d7");
bool stopRunning = false;

// Load your resources

while (!stopRunning) {
    while (SDL_PollEvent(&e)) {
        if (e.type == SDL_QUIT) {
            stopRunning = true;
        }
    }

    vk2dRendererStartFrame(clearColour);

    // Draw your things

    vk2dRendererEndFrame();
}

vk2dRendererWait();

// Free your resources

vk2dRendererQuit();
SDL_DestroyWindow(window);

Running the Examples

All examples are tested to work on Windows and Ubuntu. The CMakeLists.txt at the root directory will generate build systems for each example. Be sure to compile the test shader before running the examples/main/ example with:

glslc assets/test.frag -o assets/tex.frag.spv
glslc assets/test.vert -o assets/tex.vert.spv

You may also compile the binary shader blobs with the long command

genblobs.py colour.vert colour.frag instanced.vert instanced.frag model.vert model.frag shadows.vert shadows.frag tex.vert tex.frag

run from the shaders/ folder (requires Python).

TODO

• 3D shaders