Vulkan Starter

A basic Vulkan implementation that renders a simple triangle. If you see this, then please be aware that the code is still a work in progress as I continue to clean up the code and increase readability.

Requirements

• GLFW - Cross-platform windowing
• Vulkan SDK - Graphics API
• CMake - Project configuration/building

Dependencies

As mentioned above, GLFW is used for the cross-platform windowing. This example project includes the GLFW repository as a git submodule. When cloning the repository the full command is:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:ZOulhadj/VulkanStarter.git.

This will ensure that you clone both the actual repository and all dependencies which this case is only GLFW.

Building

Before building, your system needs to have the VulkanSDK installed. Once installed it's installed, inspect the CompileShaders.sh file and ensure that the paths within the file point to the correct SDK directory. This will allow the shader compiler program to be found and used to convert the shader files from text to SPIR-V (More details regarding this are mentioned below).

After the SDK and paths to the SDK have been set up, you can compile the project. Although CMake is used to create makefiles and project files, you have to ensure that you have the correct programs installed. For example, if generating Visual Studio solution files on Windows then this does not apply. However, if creating a makefile then g++ is required and thus, needs to be installed and set in the system path.

Then from within the Build folder, call cmake ../. This will create an "out of source" build which will ensure that build files do not get mixed with the program source code.

Shader Compiling

Unlike in OpenGL, shaders cannot be loaded as text directly to Vulkan. Instead, Vulkan requires shaders to be in the SPIR-V (Standard, Portable Intermediate Representation-V) intermediate language format when loaded.

This example project already includes precompiled SPIR-V shader files with the Build/Shaders folder, however, if you make any changes to the source text shader files then make sure to compile them again. There are a few ways to achieve this however, for simplicity, the Vulkan SDK provides a program called glslc which converts the shader files at Source/Shaders from text to SPIR-V and outputs them to the Build/Shaders directory which then get loaded at runtime to Vulkan. To compile the shaders again simply run the CompileShaders.sh file.

Running

It's assumed that the working directory is within the Build folder. If not, then make sure you specify the relative path to the shader from wherever the program is running from.