🌋 VulkanEngine

A work-in-progress 3D game engine built on Vulkan — multithreaded rendering, Bullet physics and a clean application framework.

⚠️ Work in progress. This is an experimental engine playground — APIs and structure change constantly, and many features are incomplete.

The repository is split into a reusable engine framework (engine/) and a small demo game (src/, include/) that drops a physics-driven cube onto a plane with a free-look camera.

✨ Features

• 🧵 Multithreaded frame loop — a dedicated render thread synchronized with the main (update) thread via binary semaphores, with MAX_FRAMES_IN_FLIGHT = 2
• 📊 Built-in profiler overlay — FPS, CPU/GPU thread times and wait times plotted live with ImGui
• 🗄️ Vulkan abstractions — device selection, swapchain, render passes, graphics pipelines & pipeline layouts, command buffers, shaders, images and debug utils wrapped in small RAII-style classes
• 💾 VMA-backed buffers — uniform buffers and push-constant buffers built on Vulkan Memory Allocator
• 🧱 Bullet physics integration — GameWorld manages game objects with rigid bodies and collision shapes
• 📦 OBJ mesh loading — models loaded via OBJ_Loader and indexed 16-bit meshes
• 💡 Blinn-Phong lit pipeline — ambient + diffuse + specular shading in GLSL, compiled to SPIR-V
• 🎥 FPS-style camera — raw mouse input, cursor locking, WASD fly movement
• 🧩 Application framework — derive from Engine::Application, override createWindow / loadAssets / init / update / render / gui and call Engine::Engine::run(game)

🎮 Controls (demo)

Input	Action
W A S D	Fly camera
Mouse	Look around
Esc	Toggle cursor lock

🛠️ Tech stack

Dependency	Purpose
Vulkan + Vulkan-Headers	Graphics API
VulkanMemoryAllocator	GPU memory management
GLFW	Windowing & input
glm	Math
Bullet3	Physics
Dear ImGui (Vulkan & GLFW bindings)	Debug UI
meshoptimizer	Mesh optimization
plog	Logging
stb, zlib, aklomp/base64	Images, compression, encoding

All dependencies are managed through the vcpkg manifest (vcpkg.json).

🔨 Building

Requirements: CMake ≥ 3.25, a C++20 compiler (MSVC), vcpkg, and the Vulkan SDK.

git clone https://github.com/kewldan/VulkanEngine.git
cd VulkanEngine

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release `
      -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<path-to-vcpkg>/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
cmake --build build --config Release

Compiling shaders

GLSL sources in shaders/ must be compiled to SPIR-V (data/shaders/*.spv) with glslc from the Vulkan SDK:

.\shader_compilation.bat

The script assumes the SDK at C:\VulkanSDK\1.3.250.1 — edit the path for your installation. Run the executable from the repository root so it can find the data/ folder.