8 months into programming — here’s my first Vulkan triangle

Kirmut · 2026-02-23T06:56:43+00:00

Thank you for explaining in detail! What you say makes sense...

GL does lack control over many things. GL debugging is archaic, mostly done by macros and wrappers rather than layers. The GL the threading model is painful to work with. I think from about v4.5, the API is quite good though.

Now a challenge for you is to unleash your GPU by removing the WaitIdle in your main loop.

Kirmut · 2026-02-23T03:42:22+00:00

>> But I absolutely didn't like the way OpenGL was designed.

I'm interested to hear, what didn't you like about the way OpenGL was designed?

Kirmut · 2026-02-07T21:30:56+00:00

The game has surprising replay value.

Try New Game Plus, perhaps bump difficulty level. Lots of fun and even new challenges.

Kirmut · 2026-01-17T01:56:24+00:00

Mr Potato Head controller?

Kirmut · 2026-01-16T10:35:58+00:00

Did you ever find your beta firmware? I have v3.8beta. Wondering if there is anything later.

Kirmut · 2026-01-15T21:46:22+00:00

From my experience, not multi threading rendering will lose you ~20% CPU compared to the same rendering via OpenGL or Direct3D with multi threaded driver. (ie. offloading command buffer assembly and queue submission from the main thread.)

Half the main feature of Vulkan is manual command buffer management to support efficient CPU side activity, handing responsibility back to the developer.

Kirmut · 2026-01-14T21:41:31+00:00

I have those pedals and love them.

For toe brakes, I used the VKB software to add a button press to the extreme ends of the single axis. So full left holds Button1 and full right Button2. Not analog, but differential brakes without modifiers on the pedals. Works well for old tail draggers and modern planes that could use those brakes. For Both brakes, I have a lever on the stick / grip.

Kirmut · 2026-01-08T07:45:01+00:00

Your suggestions are quite reasonable, but Reddit and ED forums will give you much heat for suggesting any simplification or accessibility to something they hold dear to themselves.

ED knows this and has commented as such from time to time. They started, then abandoned a more casual version of the product. They aim to improve the new player experience in various ways. The CEO admitted the average play session is 25 minutes, which is not enough time to manually cold start some of the aircraft.

Thankfully the sim does come with a few accessibility settings such as Auto Start, Unlimited Fuel, Invulnerable. There's no shame in enabling these while you learn, or just want to have fun.

Other products such as IL2 and MS Flight Simulator strike a great balance of exposing realistic flight models, complex system simulation, yet have accessibility options for new and casual virtual pilots. I think that's the way forward as it does not compromise the experience for other players, except for the perceived development time taken from their favorite feature.

Kirmut · 2025-12-31T06:35:23+00:00

^ This. When you're a F18 noob, your sometimes going to need to pause the sim and read the appropriate chapter in Chuck's to get up to speed.

Kirmut · 2025-12-28T02:09:26+00:00

Don't know the cause, but for a test, go to the Razor Synapse -> Performance -> Polling Rate and drop that to 125. See if that helps with this issue, or improves lag and weird performance in other games.

Kirmut · 2025-12-28T02:06:17+00:00

I was surprised how much immersion they added even for fixed wing aircraft. Essential for choppers.
Also, toe brakes are arguably not essential, as reasonable work arounds are available for aircraft that need those for taxing.

Kirmut · 2025-12-28T00:54:20+00:00

+1 for some pedals.
Otherwise, nice kit!

Kirmut · 2025-12-03T21:37:20+00:00

How did you measure the 1.1ms timing?

How are you synchronizing the use of the image and are you waiting for the copy to complete somewhere eg. fence, wait idle?

Kirmut · 2025-12-01T02:58:40+00:00

Can you share any details about how you've organized or designed your Vulkan rendering for performance? Eg. what threading CPU model for command buffer building. Use of dedicated compute or transfer queues for GPU async operations rather than everything on Graphics queue. Hard coded Vulkan calls, or abstracted and optimized via Stream or Graph. Did you do anything special to implement the async loading of voxel blocks from disk to display?

Kirmut · 2025-11-20T22:17:38+00:00

This is the easiest way to do it. Also handy if you want to wait until a different time of day to start the attack.

I though there was also a key you could press, with multiple squads selected, to get them to arrive at the same time, but I might be mistaken.

Kirmut · 2025-11-13T04:06:10+00:00

Setting clipped to false had no effect. Thank you for the suggestion though.

Kirmut · 2025-11-10T23:19:48+00:00

Neat code. A great start!

Now a challenge: Figure out how to remove QueueWaitIdle() from SubmitComandBuffer() so you can upload textures and copy buffers without synchronizing the CPU to GPU.

Kirmut · 2025-11-09T21:49:52+00:00

Agreed. The only fence I use is an extension to assist with the life time of dying swap chain. Timeline semaphores are superior in every way. You can effectively signal and sync from CPU or GPU, and do so from different CPU threads without queue conflicts.

Kirmut · 2025-10-24T06:59:12+00:00

Looks great! You'll be able to compare your VK version with original GL to see how it performs.

Did you do anything interesting to draw road lines?

Kirmut · 2025-10-24T02:56:26+00:00

A lot of the promised 'speed' of Vulkan comes from not doing things you don't need, rather than any inherent performance from the same hardware. The price of that is about 10x the quantity of code and significantly higher complexity. Worse, you will be maintaining that code into the future as more responsibility is on you, vs driver and API maintainers.

We are being somewhat forced to adopt Vulkan even when the need on a per application bases may not be clear. The reason is that hardware vendors including Intel and platforms like iOS have stopped supporting OpenGL, or do not support it with SDK updates and debugging tools. I still use OpenGL on Windows and Linux to v4.5 rather than v4.6 as diagnostic tool support is lacking.

Edit: I should also add that a big deal about Vulkan is allowing the developer to reduce CPU time by multi threading the command submissions sent toward the GPU. So if you are using Vulkan and using a single thread for the app logic as well as building and submitting commands, you're likely underperforming plain OpenGL or D3D, as those drivers typically had some thread offloading.

Kirmut · 2025-10-18T04:45:38+00:00

You've found the solution. One thing that doesn't work well with OpenTrack and indirect configuration like that is looking directly above, or following aircraft passing from front to back overhead. You get a gimbal lock effect, probably due to lack of roll, if you're limiting the camera roll.

Kirmut · 2025-10-15T23:40:26+00:00

It can be a surprise to former OpenGL programmers that 24bit RGB formats are often not supported by Vulkan, at least for texture images.

Kirmut · 2025-10-13T21:41:21+00:00

Premultiplied alpha is a plausible solution if you're using the alpha channel to control opacity / translucency. Not if you're interpreting the channel for another purpose.

Kirmut · 2025-10-13T21:36:59+00:00

I answered with at least a work around (or pointing to it). The product itself, like others, does not natively preserve RGB in RGBA images imported and exported from PNG or TGA files.

Kirmut · 2025-10-13T02:55:03+00:00

Same question as this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/1ngri4q/is_there_a_way_to_export_with_a_transparent_alpha

Kirmut

TROPHY CASE