pong-vk

Overview

An implmentation of Pong using the Vulkan rendering API. This an educational project intended to be used to learn the basics of Vulkan. Since Pong is a fairly straighforward game, it was chosen to be the implementation for the project.

This repo will primarily follow the Vulkan tutorials by Alexander Overvoorde. These will be used to build the renderer. All game logic will be handled seprately of the tutorial.

Progress

We've also managed to load in a texture and apply it to a descriptor set. Now we need to work out how to enable multiple textures to be added and loaded during runtime.

Next Steps:

With this step complete, we can now focus on:

1. Adding texture support to the engine.
2. Cleaning up the renderer/renderer2D modules to make them more coherent.
   1. Add a scene system for grouping objects
   2. Perhaps add text rendering support...?

Setup Notes

NOTE: This project contains submodules. Please remember to clone the project with --recursive-submodules prepended. I.e:

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Raelr/pong-vk.git

Alternatively, you can also clone the repo and run the commands:

$ git submodules init
$ git submodules update

If you find that the submodules fail to install, you should try and delete the following directories:

• vendor/glm
• vendor/spdlog
• vendor/GLFW/glfw
• vendor/stb

Then try and re-run the submodules command and see if it works.

Required Compiler

Please compile the project using Clang.

MacOS Setup

To successfully run the project in MacOS, a few conditions must be met:

1. The MacOS Vulkan SDK must be installed on the machine (SDK can be found here)

2. The VULKAN_SDK environment variable must be set on your system. This can be done by exporting the variable in your .bash_profile (or .zshrc) file. Steps to doing that are as follows:

   1. Open your .bash_profile or .zshrc file using the command: ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zshrc.
   2. Add an export command to the file such as: export VULKAN_SDK=<PATH_TO_VULKAN_SDK_MACOS_DIRECTORY>. Your VulkanSDK development tree should have a MacOS directory, this is where the variable should point to.
   3. Save the file, close the terminal and run the following command: echo $VULKAN_SDK. If you see output then you've successfully configured the environment variable!

Building the project

This project primarily uses Premake as it's build system. Premake is a tool which essentually preprocesses a project for usage by other tools. Premake can generate project files for Visual Studio, XCode, Gmake, and others (Please check here for available configurations).

For this example we'll use gmake2 (since this is the system used by this project).

First, generate the files using the premake command:

$ premake/premake5 gmake 

You should see output similar to the following:

Building configurations...
Running action 'gmake'...
Done (58ms).

Once this is done, simply run the build commands for Make:

$ make config=debug all

You should then see similar output to this:

==== Building GLFW (debug) ====
==== Building Pong (debug) ====
main.cpp
Linking Pong

Finally, run the project by running the command:

$ ./bin/Debug/Pong 

You should then see the window show up!

You can also simply navigate to the bin/Debug folder and run the Pong file manually from there.

Windows Setup

Windows is now supported. Like the MacOS installation, it requires that you have the Vulkan installation directory set in your environment variables.

You should be able to generate your Visual Studio project code by opening the windows CLI and navigating to the project directory. When in the project directory, run the following command:

[From project directory]
premake\premake5.exe vs2019

This should generate the appropriate visual studio files. After that, open the generated .sln file and you should be able to run the project from there!

NOTE: Remember to change your Visual Studio compiler to Clang. You can do so by following the instructions laid out here.