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How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

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Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#41

Post by whstl »

raincole wrote: post #30
anvuong wrote: post #12

Vulkan was one of the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. It's so unintuitive and tedious that seemingly drains the joy out of programming. Tiny brain =(

I think anyone who ever looked at typical Vulcan code examples would reach the same conclusion: it's not for application/game developers. I really hope SDL3 or wgpu could be the abstraction layer that settles all these down. I personally bet on SDL3 just because they have support from Valve, a company that has reasons to care about cross platform gaming. But I would look into wgpu too (...if I were better at rust, si…

Yep. Most of the engine and "game from scratch" tutorials on Youtube, etc, use this style of having OpenGL code strewn around the app.

With Vulkan this is borderline impossible and it becomes messy quite quickly. It's very low level. Unlike OpenGL, one really needs an abstraction layer on top, so you either gotta use a library or write your own in the end.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#42

Post by 59nadir »

on_the_train wrote: post #37
thegrim33 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SDL 3.0 introduced their GPU API a year or so ago, which is an abstraction layer on top of vulkan/others, might want to check it out. Although after writing an entire engine with it, I ended up wanting more control, more perf, and to not be limited by the lowest common denominator limits of the various backends, and just ended up switching back to a Vulkan-based engine. However, I took a lot of learnings from the SDL…

But sdl is super high level. If you want to do more than pong, you'll hit a wall very quickly. I just want OpenGL, it was the perfect level of abstraction. I still use it today, both at work and for personal projects.

For what it's worth my experience with Metal was that it was the closest any of the more modern APIs got to OpenGL. It's just stuck on an irrelevant OS. If they made sure you could use it on Windows & Linux I think it'd fill a pretty cool niche.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#43

Post by 59nadir »

ryandrake wrote: post #13
tombert wrote: post #4

My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…

As someone who did OpenGL programming for a very, very long time, I fully agree with you. Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API. We have the very high level game engines, and very low level things like Vulkan and Metal which are basically thin abstractions on top of GPU hardware. But we are missing that fun “draw a triangle” middle API that lets you pick up and learn 3D Graph…

OpenGL still exists, runs and works fine on the two platforms that matter. I think its death has been overstated quite a bit.

With that said we decided to focus on DX12 eventually because it just made sense. I've written our platform layers targetting OpenGL, DX12, Vulkan and Metal and once you've just internalized all of these I really don't think the horribleness of the lower level APIs is as bad as people make them out to be. They're very debuggable, very clear and well supported.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#44

Post by DeathArrow »

>If you haven’t done any graphics programming before, you should start with OpenGL

I remember reading NeHe OpenGL tutorials about 23 years ago. I still believe it was one of the best tutorial series about anything in the way they were structured and how each tutorial built over knowledge acquired in previous ones.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#45

Post by 59nadir »

engeljohnb wrote: post #26
ryandrake wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who did OpenGL programming for a very, very long time, I fully agree with you. Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API. We have the very high level game engines, and very low level things like Vulkan and Metal which are basically thin abstractions on top of GPU hardware. But we are missing that fun “draw a triangle” middle API that lets you pick up and learn 3D Graph…

If I were starting a new project, would it be unwise to just use OpenGL? It's what I'm used to, but people seem to talk about it as if it's deprecated or something. I know it is on Apple, but let's just assume I don't care about Apple specifically.

OpenGL is fine, it has the same issues now it had before but none of it really comes from "old age" or being deprecated in any way. It's not as debuggable and much harder to get good performance out of than the lower level APIs but beyond that it's still great.

Honestly, starting out with OpenGL and moving to DX12 (which gets translated to Vulkan on Linux very reliably) is not a bad plan overall; DX12 is IMO a nicer and better API than Vulkan while still retaining the qualities that makes it an appropriate one once you actually want control.

Edit:

I would like to say that I really think one ought to use DSA (Direct State Access) and generally as modern of a OpenGL usage as one can, though. It's easy to get bamboozled into using older APIs because a lot of tutorials will do so, but you need to translate those things into modern modern OpenGL instead; trust me, it's worth it.

Actual modern OpenGL is not as overtly about global state as the older API so at the very least you're removing large clusters of bugs by using DSA.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#46

Post by dontlaugh »

59nadir wrote: post #42
on_the_train wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But sdl is super high level. If you want to do more than pong, you'll hit a wall very quickly. I just want OpenGL, it was the perfect level of abstraction. I still use it today, both at work and for personal projects.

For what it's worth my experience with Metal was that it was the closest any of the more modern APIs got to OpenGL. It's just stuck on an irrelevant OS. If they made sure you could use it on Windows & Linux I think it'd fill a pretty cool niche.

WebGPU is in many ways closer to Metal than to Vulkan. You can use the API outside of the browser too, especially in Rust.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#47

Post by DeathArrow »

tombert wrote: post #4

My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…

There was XNA but it was abandoned a long time ago.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#48

Post by DeathArrow »

ryandrake wrote: post #13
tombert wrote: post #4

My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…

As someone who did OpenGL programming for a very, very long time, I fully agree with you. Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API. We have the very high level game engines, and very low level things like Vulkan and Metal which are basically thin abstractions on top of GPU hardware. But we are missing that fun “draw a triangle” middle API that lets you pick up and learn 3D Graph…

>Maybe unpopular opinion: only a relative handful of developers working on actually making game engines need the detailed control Vulkan gives you.

If you make a game instead of a game engine, you can use one of the existing engines.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#49

Post by 59nadir »

dontlaugh wrote: post #46
59nadir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth my experience with Metal was that it was the closest any of the more modern APIs got to OpenGL. It's just stuck on an irrelevant OS. If they made sure you could use it on Windows & Linux I think it'd fill a pretty cool niche.

WebGPU is in many ways closer to Metal than to Vulkan. You can use the API outside of the browser too, especially in Rust.

I'll check out WebGPU at some point, I guess. I've written our rendering layer in all of the major APIs (OpenGL, DX12, Vulkan and Metal) and found it very instructive to have all of them to compare at the same time because it really underscored the differences; especially maintaining all of them at the same time. We eventually decided to focus only on DX12, but I think I'll revive this "everything all at once" thing for some side projects.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#50

Post by jbb67 »

ryandrake wrote: post #16
anvuong wrote: post #12

Vulkan was one of the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. It's so unintuitive and tedious that seemingly drains the joy out of programming. Tiny brain =(

You don't have a tiny brain. Vulkan is a low-level chip abstraction API, and is about as joyful to use as a low-level USB API. For a more fun experience with very small amounts of source code needed to get started, I'd recommend trying OpenGL (especially pre-2.0 when they introduced shaders and started down the GPU-programming path), but the industry is dead-set on killing OpenGL for some reason.

Vulkan is definitely a major pain and very difficult to learn... But once you've created an init function, a create buffer function, a create material function etc which you do once you can largely then just ignore it and write at a higher level.

I don't like Vulkan. I keep thinking did nobody look at this and think 'there must be a better way' but it's what we've got and mostly it's just learn it and write the code once

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