Some of you who follow me on Twitter or its Ogre thread may be aware of it.
But if you don’t: We added Vulkan support! And with it, Android support came along!
The vast majority of features and samples are already working, but there are some missing pieces (see Github ticket) but overall it is much more stable and robust than I’d hoped to be at this stage.
The last time we spoke about this was in November 2019 with our Vulkan Progress Report post. We’ve come a long way since then!
Shout-out to user Hotshot5000
This work was possible because user Hotshot5000 took my branch, forked it, and advanced it further.
The Vulkan port was a daunting, overwhelming task and his contributions greatly helped me figure out the way to make it work.
It also saved me a lot of time. Even though around 40% of his code couldn’t make it into the final version, it was still very important as a proof of concept or as a reference implementation to base from, or as a way to compare new non-working code against a working reference.
Moving forward
Documentation is still being updated. Docs on how to compile for Android is already up.
Existing applications may need to perform additional work to get Vulkan running (e.g. port shaders to Vulkan). While this isn’t difficult, there is no guide written yet.
The 2.3 preparations ticket has a list of things that have changed that may require a dev’s attention when porting from 2.2 to 2.3
This list is updated at irregular intervals; and once 2.3 is out this page is probably going to be moved somewhere else (in fact it is a draft for the News post whenever we release 2.3). But for the time being that ticket is our hub for checking 2.2 -> 2.3 changes.
Users wanting to learn how Vulkan works in Ogre may be very interested in reading the new RootLayout class documentation
That’s all for now! We’re very excited in what comes out of this
Further discussion in forum thread.