OpenGL Vulkan and What to expect this year...

So Vulkan was released today! What better reason to do a blog post, when it's been so highly anticipated for so long. I can't wait to get stuck into the API and Reference documents and start trying to throw some tech demo's together. 

I have just got hold of the SDK and had a little play around with the Demo's, I've not managed to get much done but the whole thing does look much more "DirectXy" which will likely have it's good and bad points. for example the horrendously long class/struct names. I've already seen "VkPipelineInputAssemblyStateCreateInfo" as a name and I'm sure there will be plenty longer. It will obviously have it's benefits in terms of performance but I'm not sure we will really experience that for a while. Anyway here is a quick video of me after messing with the textures a little with the cube demo:

As you can see it all looks a little messed up. The cube is spinning incredibly slow as well as I don't think it uses delta time for the rotation, so the recording application almost halted the rotation. What can you expect from a half hour mess around?

So what will I be doing this year?

It's been a while since my 2015 post-mortem and I really wanted to point out some of the things I will be concentrating on this year. I have just fully moved in to my new flat with Meg in Blackpool so that is the reason I haven't done any real work or blogged for a while. 

So this year my main focus is going to be on:

• Getting my Space Invaders game finished off, and I mean fully polished!
• Developing my skills in Blender.
• Slowly making parts of the JBEngine OpenSource.
• Trying to contribute much more to the OpenSource Community.
• Getting stuck in to Vulkan, hopefully integrating it with the JBEngine at some point.
• Making the JBEngine Cross Platform.

So far I've not done so well on these goals other than the last two. You can't really call a 30 minute play with the demo's "Getting stuck in" though. I have been working on getting the Maths and Sound libraries of the JBEngine to compile for linux. I started using CMake last Saturday and I really feel like I was getting somewhere. I am going to set myself a target of getting those two libraries working for Linux, and OSX in the next week or so which shouldn't be too difficult. 

Anyway that's pretty much it, oh and I did do some work with blender over the past month so here is some dev art to laugh at:

It's supposed to be a Starfish, in case you were wondering. 

​Cheers :)