urho3d VS Open-Source Vulkan C++ API

Urho3D, an open source C++ game engine.

I believe Urho3d supports MacOS (see 'about' page on the legacy website).

Urho3D

If you're literally clueless your best bet is to first start learning with an existing clean-ish engine like Urho3D implementing whatever feature/screwing-around or start with a framework like nVidia's Donut that gets you your window and basic rendering in place.

I would recommend tracking through the gist of Urho3D's batch/batchqueue stuff as it's a reasonable setup that is very intelligible (if you speak C++), it's not the greatest thing on the planet but you should be able to roughly grok it in an afternoon. Doing draw batch-pumps greatly streamlines the final drawing code.

You could try Urho3D or its newer fork rbfx.

I use an engine called rbfx which is a fork of the Urho3D engine. A lot of it is just the fact that I've been using it for over a decade, so I am comfortable with it. I'm a programmer, not really comfortable with integrated editor engines such as Unity or Godot, and the easy C++ extensibility of the engine appeals to me. Plus it's decently powerful, and well supported on a lot of platforms (I build for Windows, WebGL, and very occasionally RPi for the most part) and is open source to satisfy that stubbornly libertarian side of my character.

You might be interested in Urho3D.

If you don't mind something experimental, there is a C# version of Urho3D that is in fairly active development. There is also a C#-scriptable branch of the Urho3D fork, rbfx, located here. Both of these projects are still pretty in-the-works, but are still pretty usable.

It might be useful to maybe look at the Vulkan.hpp examples since you can do the same in about 200 lines of code. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp/blob/main/samples/15_DrawCube/15_DrawCube.cpp

Wow that library looks amazing, I'll definitely be using it. Bonus that it's official from the Khronos Group. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp

Even auto-generated c++ wrappers like vulkan-hpp require lots of manual maintenance.

Ultimately I went with vulkan.hpp RAII bindings, even though that way also has some learning curve and I couldn't find any documentation other than the RAII programming guide. It's great for getting started, but could use a complementary auto-generated API doc. There are also decent programming samples, which really suck for getting started, but otherwise do a good job of presenting concepts they focus on. Putting the available resources together I was able to get a project going in two weekends.

This is exactly how the official Vulkan C++ API, Vulkan-Hpp does it. For the precise example mentioned in the blog post:

Or the vulkan.hpp RAII samples would be a good place?

For a real-life example: consider the vk::raii namespace of Vulkan-Hpp, where the developers have posted examples. The vk::raii::su namespace has a bunch of free functions that one might think are associated with a Vulkan instance/object (in fact, the Vulkan Tutorial does implement them as member functions), but they are much nicer when used as pure functions. It keeps the class/struct definition itself nice and clean.

final c++17 draft (N4659) first post-publication draft after c++20 (N4868) vulkan-structs.hpp (containing the vk::ImageCreateInfo definition) VkImageCreateInfo struct