Vulkan backend

[alichraghi]

I'm eager to contribute it

[david-vanderson]

Awesome!

The first thing we need is a demo app (not using dvui) that renders a triangle and a textured triangle. Do you have that kind of thing?

I tried to get https://github.com/ezzieyguywuf/zcad running but ran into build errors.

[alichraghi]

Yeah i can extract some stuff from my own game or copy vulkan-zig-demo.

[Deins]

I was messing around with this couple months ago around Christmas with this. I got quite far with zig 13 and version back then. Overall was working without support of render-textures. Somewhat got stuck there, otherwise was fully functional.

IMHO, the somewhat painful part was figuring out what backend to use for window creation and input as vulkan doesn't handle it.
I somewhat ugly hacked it to piggy back on sdl3 while overriding any rendering callbacks, might be better solution possible.

Otherwise in nearest time I doubt I will have time to work on it. So feel free to attempt to updaet it or borrow anything if you want. Or write it yourself.

My attempt:
https://github.com/Deins/s3-vk/blob/master/src/dvui_vulkan_renderer.zig
With local dvui dependancy at path ./deps/. I think I tested it on linux, but maybe its windows only for now.
https://github.com/Deins/dvui/tree/vulkan
Cheers.

[david-vanderson]

Amazing thank you! It looks like sdl has vulkan support, so that would be one option (adding that to the sdl backend). Or could write a new glfw backend for it.

@alichraghi Can you give more details of what you want to do with it? Do you have a vulkan app already and want to add dvui on top of it? Or are you starting from scratch and want to do low-level vulkan stuff on part of the screen with dvui widgets alongside?

[Deins]

In regards to sdl3 specifically: I didn't figure out a way to interop sdl3 / sdl3-gpu rendering with native vulkan rendering as far as I tried.
You can use sdl3 with its vulkan backed that works fine including stock dvui sdl3 backend.
But if you want to do your own vulkan rendering stuff AND still render something with sdl/sdl-gpu as far as I tried I didn't have any luck.

But for other platforms - yes vulkan "rendering" backend could be itself useful as rendering code would itself be more cross platform. Only it needs something on each platform to handle creating window and platform specific input - that can be done natively on each platform or use libs such as sdl or glfw.

[david-vanderson]

@Deins Thanks so much for the information!

[alichraghi]

Do you have a vulkan app already and want to add dvui on top of it

Yes. i need to write a GLFW backend as well. then we can create an example using only dvui+vulkan-zig+(glfw/sdl)