Cross-platform development library SDL3 gets a Vulkan Renderer and camera API

With development work ongoing for SDL3, some recent exciting improvements include a Vulkan Render backend and a camera API.

What is SDL? Simple DirectMedia Layer is an open source cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, graphics hardware and more. It's popular and used by quite a lot of games, even Valve use it. See more on the official site.

SDL3 is going to be a pretty big release and just recently Valve developer Dan Ginsburg had their Vulkan Renderer merged into the project. From the pull request:

This pull request adds an implementation of a Vulkan Render backend to SDL. I have so far tested this primarily on Windows, but also smoke tested on Linux and macOS (MoltenVK). I have not tried it yet on Android, but it should be usable there as well (sans any bugs I missed). This began as a port of the SDL Direct3D12 Renderer, which is the closest thing to Vulkan as existed in the SDL codebase. The shaders are more or less identical (with the only differences being in descriptor bindings vs root descriptors). The shaders are built using the HLSL frontend of glslang.

Everything in the code is pure Vulkan 1.0 (no extensions), with the exception of HDR support which requires the Vulkan instance extension VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace. The code could have been simplified considerably if I used dynamic rendering, push descriptors, extended dynamic state, and other modern Vulkan-isms, but I felt it was more important to make the code as vanilla Vulkan as possible so that it would run on any Vulkan implementation.

On top of that developer Ryan Gordon also posted on Patreon about the new camera API, which enables SDL3 to access cameras across many platforms and a quick rough video was shown of it in action on Linux below:

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