Vulkan2D Documentation

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 Sea of Clouds internally use Vulkan2D for rendering. My other projects Bedlam, Spacelink, and Peace & Liberty also used Vulkan2D, although a much older version of it. Check out the quick-start guide.

Features

• Simple, fast, and intuitive API built on top of SDL
• Draw shapes/textures/3D models/arbitrary polygons to the screen or to 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

Documentation

Check out the documentation website.

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, 2.0.6+
Vulkan 1.1+
C11 + C standard library
C++17 (VMA uses C++17)

Example

By default the program automatically crashes on fatal errors, but you may specify Vulkan2D to not do that and check for errors on your own. The following example uses default settings meaning that if there is an error in VK2D, it will print the status to vk2derror.txt and quit.

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);

If you don't want VK2D to crash on errors you may specify that in the struct VK2DStartupOptions passed to vk2dRendererInit and check for errors yourself with vk2dStatus, vk2dStatusMessage, and vk2dStatusFatal. Any VK2D function can raise fatal errors but unless you pass bad pointers to VK2D functions, they will not crash if there is a fatal error and will instead simply do nothing.

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

If you don't trust binary blobs you may also compile the binary shader blobs with the command

genblobs.py colour.vert colour.frag instanced.vert instanced.frag model.vert model.frag shadows.vert shadows.frag spritebatch.comp

run from the shaders/ folder (requires Python).

Roadmap

• Asynchronous loading
• Ability to disable 3D resources
• GPU readback
• Soft shadows