Project Island 🌋🐎

Project Island is an experimental Vulkan Renderer for Linux and Windows, written in C/C++.

Island is written for rapid protoyping and tweaking. That's why it allows hot-reloading wherever possible: for C/C++ application code, GLSL or HLSL shader code, even the renderer's own core modules.

Island is fast to compile. A full rebuild should take < 5s on a moderate multicore machine, and incremental builds often take < 1s.

To achieve this aim, Island is structured into strictly separated modules, which can be dropped in or out during Debug, while for Release, you can build a single, statically linked and optimised binary.

Main Features:

• Hot-reloading: An Island project is made from isolated c/cpp modules, each of which can be tweaked, re-compiled at runtime, and automatically hot-reloaded.

• Shader hot-reloading: Island supports shader code hot-reloading for HLSL, GLSL, or SPIR-V shader source files. Shader files are automatically watched, and any change triggers a recompile, with (Vulkan) pipelines automatically rebuilt if needed. HLSL/GLSL Shaders may use #include directives. Error messages (if any) will point at shader file and line number, and include a brief listing with problematic lines highlighted in context.

• Fast compile times: Because of Island's modular architecture, a recompilation & reload cycle typically takes less than 1 second, while the application keeps running. Compiling the whole codebase from scratch should take less than 5 seconds when using LLVM on an average multi-core machine.

• Code tweaks: Near-instant in-code parameter tweaks for Debug builds (no need to recompile) by using a special TWEAK() macro.

• Vulkan backend: Island has a Vulkan rendering backend, which, on Linux, allows access to new and experimental GPU features soon after they are released. The renderer takes care of most of the bureaucracy which comes with modern APIs: Vulkan resources are automatically synchronised, and only allocated when needed. Most resource properties are inferred automatically based on the context of how the resource is being used. Pipelines are compiled and recompiled on demand. When compiled in Debug mode, Vulkan validation layers are loaded by default.

• Rendergraph- based architecture: Rendering is structured using renderpasses. Renderpasses are executed on-demand and synchronised automatically by evaluating a rendergraph. If a renderpass is detected to have no effect on the final image, it is automatically pruned. When requested, the rendergraph generates .dot files, which can be drawn using graphviz. More about how Island builds its rendergraph in this blog post.

  

• Automatic GPU multiqueue: renderpasses are automatically distributed onto any avaliable render queues - if resources need to be transferred between queue families, this happens automatically. More about how Island distributes workloads across renderqueues and synchronises them in this blog post.

• Static release binaries: While Island is highly modular and dynamic when compiled for Debug, it can compile into a single, optimised static binary for Release.

• Interactive Console if you add the le_console module to your app, it will listen on localhost port 3535 and, if you connect to it via telnet or similar, if will provide you with an interactive console. You can use this to change settings on a running application, and to filter and monitor log messages. Use reverse-ssh or similar to forward localhost::3535 and you can remotely connect to a running app from all over the world.

• Gamepad support: the default camera can be steered with a gamepad-just connect your gamepad and you are set; application windows can decide whether they want to subscribe to gamepad events- and to which gamepads to subscribe to.

  

• Tracy intergation nano-second-resolution profiling via Tracy - enable this by uncommenting a single line in the app CMakeLists file. Profiling works with both hot-reloading and optimised static builds.

• Multi-Window Island allows you to hook up multiple swapchains to a single application. You can dynamically add and remove swapchains while your Island application is running. This is particularly useful for multi-window scenarios. See example

• Straight to video: Island can render straight to screen using the direct rendering swapchain, or use any number of available options for a window-based vulkan swapchain. It's also easy to render straight to an mp4 file, or an image sequence without showing a window, by selecting the appropriate le_swapchain specialisation.

• Helpers: minimal effort to enable multisampling, import images, import, display and use fonts

• 2D drawing context: Draw thick lines and curves using le_paths, which specialises in 2D meshes. This module implements a useful subset of the SVG command palette, and includes some extras like for example a command to smoothen open or closed Bézier curves by applying the Hobby algorithm. Thick Bézier curves are drawn using an algorithm after T. F. Hain.

• glTF Island wraps cgltf for gltf file import, and the le_stage module can display and render most features found in gltf 2.0 files: pbrt materials, vertex animations, morph target animations, and skinning animations.

• Job-system: Cooperatively parallel workloads can be implemented using the le_jobs module, which implements a job system using coroutine-like fibers. Both backend and render modules are designed to minimise resource contention.

• GPU ray tracing Island supports RTX via the Khronos Vulkan raytracing extensions. Creating acceleration structures and shader binding tables is automated and simplified as much as possible. Ray tracing shaders can be hot-reloaded.

Examples (more examples)

Island comes with a number of examples. No collection of examples would be complete without a

Hello Triangle	and a Hello World example

A full list of examples can be found here. Examples can be used as starting point for new projects by using the project generator.

Tools

• Project generator: Generates scaffolding for new projects, based on project templates
• Module generator: Generates scaffolding for new modules.

Project Generator

Island projects can be scaffolded from templates (or from other, existing projects) by invoking the project generator python script. This script lives in the scripts folder, but can be invoked from anywhere.

# say myapps is where I want to place a new island project
cd island/apps/myapps

# this will create a new project based on the "hello triangle" template
../../scripts/create_project.py mynewproject

# this will create a new project based on the "full screen quad" template
../../scripts/create_project.py mynewquadproject -t quad_template

# this will create a new project based on the project "myoldproject", if it can be found in the current directory
../../scripts/create_project.py anotherproject -T . -t myoldproject

# print options and help for project generator via 
../../scripts/create_project.py -h

usage: create_project.py [-h] [-T TEMPLATE_DIR] [-t TEMPLATE_NAME]
                         project_name

Create a new Island project based on a template / or an existing
project.

positional arguments:
  project_name          Specify the name for new project to create
                        from template.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -T TEMPLATE_DIR, --template-dir TEMPLATE_DIR
                        Specify a path *relative to the current
                        directory* in which to look for project
                        template directories. Use dot (".") to search
                        for project directories within the current
                        directory - for example if you wish to
                        duplicate an existing project as a starting
                        point for a new project.
  -t TEMPLATE_NAME, --template-name TEMPLATE_NAME
                        Specify the name for template. This can be
                        the name of any project directory within
                        TEMPLATE_DIR.

Modules

Island projects can be built by combining any number of island modules. Each module aims to do one thing well, and to play nice with others. Modules are automatically hot-reloaded, if a change is detected and hot-reloading is active. Some modules provide their functionality by wrapping well-known external libraries, some are written entirely from scratch. Some of the most useful modules are listed here:

To use a module, name it as a dependency in your applidation module's CMakeLists.txt file; modules may depend on other modules, and the build system will automatically include these dependencies. You can write your own modules - and there is a module template generator which provides you with a scaffold to start from.

Setup instructions

Island should run out of the box on a modern Linux system with the current Vulkan SDK and build tools installed. For Windows, build instructions are collected in a separate readme.

Dependencies

Island depends on a few common development tools: CMake, gcc, git, ninja. These are commonly found on a development machine. Island also depends on the Vulkan SDK.

Install Vulkan SDK

Vulkan SDK >= 1.3.211

I recommend to install the latest Vulkan SDK via a package manager. Follow the installation instructions via: https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home#linux.

Arch Linux (Manjaro)

On Arch Linux, I recommend installing the following packages via pacman: shaderc vulkan-devel ninja cmake.

Building an Island project

🚨 If you freshly cloned the Island repository, remember to update submodules before proceeding.🚨

git submodule init
git submodule update --depth=1

Then move to the directory of the Island project which you want to compile:

cd apps/examples/hello_triangle/

Build using CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G Ninja ..
ninja

Run your new Island Application:

./Island-HelloTriangle

Note: The CMAKE parameter PLUGINS_DYNAMIC lets you choose whether to compile Island as a static binary, or as a thin module with dynamic plugins. Unless you change this parameter, Debug builds will be built thin/dynamic with hot-reloading enabled, and Release builds will produce a single static binary with hot-reloading disabled.

IDE support

I recommend using the freely available QT Creator IDE, it allows you to directly open CMake project files, and integrates pretty seamlessly with the Island workflow: running, hot-reloading, then setting a breakpoint, and then stepping whilst inspecting state in the debugger just works. Alternative IDEs are of course available, and as long as they support CMake project files, should work. When running an Island app with the debugger in Qt Creator, it's important to check that Run in terminal is disabled - this can be specified in the Run Settings dialog.

Auto-recompilation on save using entr

If you prefer to work without an IDE, but wish a setup where apps get recompiled as soon as a source file changes, the following Linux-based setup is pretty nice:

    cd apps/examples/hello_triangle
    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake -G Ninja ..
    # and then 
    git ls-files ../.. | entr ninja &

entr(1) is a great utility, which runs a command on file change. The last line of the above script causes ninja to run as soon as any of the files checked into the github repo at hello_triangle change.

Windows 10 support

Island can compile and run natively on Microsoft Windows - with some caveats. Progress of the Windows port and Windows-specific build instructions etc. are tracked in a separate readme.

Caveats

Note Island's API is under active development, expect lots of change. As such, there are no promises that it might be ready or fit for any purpose, and the code here is released in the hope that you might find it interesting.

The initial motivation for writing Island was to experiment with a modern rendering API (Vulkan), to learn by trying out ideas around modern realtime-rendering, and to have a framework to create visual experiments with.