vulkan transition roadmap

[malytomas]

• this roadmap

  • make it as complete and detailed as possible, it would hopefully save us some surpraises later on
  • overall strategy is to minimize the time when the engine does not render at all

• vulkan frameworks research & evaluation

• preparations

  • add custom enums for graphical properties in assets
  • replace shader subroutines with switches
  • add glslang compiler
    • are there any alternatives?
    • shader validation in asset processor
  • modify asset manager to support asynchronous assets uploads
    • add another step for loading assets that is periodically called and checks if the asset has finished its transfer to gpu memory
    • add another similar step for unloading
    • hot-reloads!

• disable opengl

  • turn opengl assets into dummies
  • remove rendering of gui
  • remove rendering internals in the engine

• initial vulkan

  • vulkan (framework) sdk linking
  • implement assets loading
  • implement minimal client application with the use of the assets (example project logo)
  • another client application with rendering gui

• vulkan engine

  • simple opaque objects
  • gui
  • hdr + gamma correction
  • shadow maps
  • transparent objects
  • post processes
  • parallelization
    • one thread for assets loads and unloads
    • one thread for each camera (actual camera or shadowmap pass)
      • iterates over the cached entities and directly generates render queues
    • one more thread for queues synchronization, dispatching, composition and final effects

• final polishing

  • stereo