Vulkan2D

Vulkan2D is a 2D renderer using Vulkan and SDL3 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 SDL3
• 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

Using VK2D is fairly simple, make sure you include all the C source files and include Vulkan2D/ (and access the files via VK2D/VK2D.h). You also need to build VMA & SDL3 with it, check one of the CMake files in examples/ for a detailed example. You will end up having something like the following:

find_package(Vulkan)
# ...
file(GLOB C_FILES Vulkan2D/VK2D/*.c)
set(VMA_FILES Vulkan2D/VulkanMemoryAllocator/src/VmaUsage.cpp)
# ...
include_directories(Vulkan2D/ ...)
add_executable(${PROJECT_NAME} main.c ${VMA_FILES} ${C_FILES})

Vulkan2D requires the following external dependencies:

SDL3, 3.2.0+
Vulkan 1.2+
C11 + C standard library
C++17 (VMA uses C++17)

Vulkan2D uses SDL3 under the hood for many things, but earlier versions used SDL2 if for whatever reason you are unable to upgrade to SDL3. Vulkan2D only requires you to init SDL_INIT_EVENTS.

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_Init(SDL_INIT_EVENTS);
SDL_Window *window = SDL_CreateWindow("VK2D", WINDOW_WIDTH, WINDOW_HEIGHT, SDL_WINDOW_VULKAN);
SDL_Event e;
VK2DRendererConfig config = {
    .msaa = VK2D_MSAA_32X, 
    .screenMode = VK2D_SCREEN_MODE_IMMEDIATE, 
    .filterMode = 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_EVENT_QUIT) {
            stopRunning = true;
        }
    }

    vk2dRendererStartFrame(clearColour);

    // Draw your things

    vk2dRendererEndFrame();
}

vk2dRendererWait();

// Free your resources

vk2dRendererQuit();
SDL_DestroyWindow(window);
SDL_Quit();

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
• Better pipelines/shader support
• GPU readback
• Soft shadows