Z8

Z8 is a personal 3D rendering engine project built with Zig, Vulkan, and SDL3. It's a rewrite in Zig of my original R3DEngine, and serves as a playground for trying out new ideas, learning graphics programming, and exploring the Zig language.

Project Overview

This project is mostly for fun and personal growth. My goal is to have a flexible engine that I can use to experiment with rendering techniques, engine architecture, and new features as I learn. It's not intended to be a full-featured or production-ready engine, but rather a simple and approachable codebase for tinkering and prototyping.

The current implementation follows the first five chapters of the excellent vkguide tutorial, with some modifications and my own ideas mixed in.

The project is moving toward a voxel engine using GPU compute shaders, so expect most improvements to be made in that direction. If you don't understand something, feel free to ask me on GitHub or under one YouTube videos.

Current Features

• Vulkan-based rendering loop
• SDL3 window and input handling
• Basic scene and material system (work in progress)
• ImGui integration for UI (work in progress)
• Basic camera and input handling
• Basic shader management
• GPU-based rendering pipeline

Getting Started

Prerequisites

You'll need:

• Zig 0.14.0
• Vulkan SDK 1.3 or higher

Building and Running

1. Clone this repository
2. Make sure the Vulkan SDK is installed and available in your PATH
3. Build the project:

   zig build
   

4. Run the engine:

   zig-out/bin/z8.exe
   

If you run into issues, double-check your Vulkan SDK installation and Zig version.

Project Structure

• src/ — Main engine source code
• assets/ — Models, shaders, and other assets
• common/ — Third-party and utility libraries
• libs/ — Zig build wrappers for dependencies
• levels/ — Example scenes and levels

Inspirations & References

• vkguide — Main inspiration and reference
• Zig documentation
• Vulkan Tutorial

Progress & Roadmap

• [] Scene shadow mapping
• [] Ambiant occlusion
• [] Group indirect draw calls
• [] Config file for engine settings

Included Libraries

The following libraries are included in the project (no need to install separately):

• SDL3
• GLM (cglm bindings)
• cgltf
• ImGui (C bindings)
• zalgebra

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License

See LICENSE for details. Credits to all upstream libraries and inspirations.