[osg-users] Vulkan SDKs released

[Robert Osfield]

Hi Chris et. al,

It's great to see Vulkan finally emerge.  Haven't had a chance to play with
it, without plenty of other work on my plate right now so won't get to it
right away, I will need to squeeze it into weekends and evenings until I
clear my current client work.

As for a new scene graph, I have been making plans over the last year for a
follow on project from the OSG that won't be graphics API specific at it's
core, but is designed to facilitate implementations for OpenGL and Vulkan,
as well as provide mechanisms for working within existing OSG applications.
I have worked on various design elements for the new scene graph, some of
which have inspired changes to the core OSG already.

Backwards compatibility for the OSG precludes a wholesale change to support
Vulkan, one possible route is hinted up by NVidia.  Last year that
suggested their drivers woll be able to mix OpenGL and Vulkan contexts
within one application (they had a demo showing this in action) so one
could possibly have an OSG application that has a subgraph within the scene
graph that is actually a sibling scene graph that actually support Vulkan.
Such a route would allow one to incremental replace OpenGL scene graph
usage with sibling scene graph rather than force a complete rewrite from
the ground up.

That's the theory... actual practice might make this idea rather difficult,
the only way to find out will be once we dive in and start implementing.

W.r.t diving into implementation of a new scene graph, personally, I'd like
to get the core design I have in mind down in code before opening it out
for other major contributions.  I feel the core would be quite difficult to
implement with too many hands/minds trying to steer the
design/implementation.  Once you have a coherent design that is modular
having developers create different modules becomes natural and scales far
better - something I've seen with the OSG project, osgEarth is a good
example.  Another area where multiple developers scales well is porting an
established core across to different platforms and graphics APIs.

It might be that I'm late to the party if I don't start coding soon ;-)

Robert.
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