Vulkanizing
Star Wars: Jedi Knight
"Porting from OpenGL to Vulkan, Enabling modern features and boosting frame rates."
"Porting from OpenGL to Vulkan, Enabling modern features and boosting frame rates."
Having already celebrated its 20th anniversary, this game series clearly has something special going on.
The dedicated community continues to bring DLC's, ranging from maps, models, skins to new game-modes and even total conversions.
Since the public release of the code-base, In addition to new content, there are also Community mods that improve stability, enhance graphics, and boost FPS.
All of this is done while maintaining the core gameplay experience that we love.
Optimizing the renderer backend is nothing new.
OpenJK introduced Rend2 years ago, improving performance and graphics by bumping OpenGL from vanilla version 1.1 to 4.3
Another key aspect is the introduction of Modularized renderer binaries. Allowing the player to switch renderers using the 'cl_renderer' setting.
Introduced by Khronos Group in 2016, it provides a instruction set helping developers to interface an application with the GPU. Game engines use it to transform vertices and textures to a 3D environment.
Game engines are slowly migrating from OpenGL to Vulkan due to its high-efficiency, low-overhead GPU access, allowing for better performance and enabling latest technologies, for example Ray Tracing.
Quake III and more games powered by "id Tech 3 engine" decided to make their code-base public, bringing various Community coders together.
Shoutout to developers from Quake-III-Arena-Kenny-Edition and Quake3e who brought Vulkan to Quake III, Along with helpfull Community Feedback is of invaluable source for this project. Even though RavenSoft's engine modifications made it challenging at times.
Showcasing the power of collaboration within the open-source community.
Core development primarily happens on a fork of EternalJK which in turn is a fork of OpenJK, providing a solid and stable base. The initial focus was a merge upstream.
That shifted when to my surprise mods started to package Vulkan with their releases. Therefore, only mindful changes outside of the renderer module are made to keep the update process simpler.
Ensuring compatibility with existing and future mods, external libaries like SDL2, imagelibs and zlib will be maintained.
