The Favorite Open-Source Vulkan Projects Of Phoronix Readers

This week I provided a look at some of the interesting Vulkan engines/renderers on GitHub created by the community in the months since the Vulkan unveil. After that article forum goers and those on Twitter shared some other promising Vulkan projects worth looking at too if you are just looking for some Vulkan demos to watch, learn more about the Vulkan API yourself, etc.

Some reader favorites of Vulkan open-source projects not mentioned in earlier Phoronix articles include:

kruseborn/vulkan - a deferred rendering implementation with SSAO using Vulkan. Though the code hasn't been touched since August it looks like it made some good progress:

BansheeEngine I never actually heard of before but comes with high regards of a Phoronix reader. The BansheeEngine is written in C++14 and designed for 2D/3D games and supports Direct3D 11 and OpenGL while Vulkan is a new addition in recent days to mainline. Banshee has its own customizable editor, has a C# scripting system, and other features. It appears quite advanced for an open-source game engine project, too bad it's not used by more software. It looks though like the Linux support isn't quite finalized yet nor their Vulkan implementation complete, but they hope for that by Q2'2017 along with a physically based renderer.

Datum is a Vulkan renderer that supports sprite rendering, mesh rendering, deferred tile-based point lighting, SSAO, SSR, HDR skybox and bloom, physically based rendering and image based lighting, and other modern features. It does work on both Linux and Windows.

WSIWindow appears to be a new LunarG project. The WSIWindow project is about providing simple, cross-platform interface for creating a Vulkan window in C++. WSI-Window also handles keyboard/mouse/touch events. It sort of is like SDL but aims to just abstract out all the windowing system and input work for just Vulkan games/applications. So far WSI-Window handles Windows, Linux Xlib/XCB, and Android while iOS, Wayland, and Mir support are still being worked on. Not a engine/renderer itself, but this new LunarG project is worth mentioning and could help ensure cross-platform Vulkan program/game support in the future.