Vulkan Boing Ball Demo

A modern Vulkan implementation of the classic Amiga "Boing Ball" demo, featuring a red/white checkered sphere bouncing over a checkerboard floor.

Features

• Red/white checkered bouncing ball with rotation
• Checkerboard floor pattern
• Dynamic shadow that scales with ball height
• Simple physics with squash/stretch animation
• Procedural textures (no external assets required)
• Blinn-Phong lighting with rim lighting

Requirements

• C++17 compiler
• Vulkan SDK (1.2+)
• CMake 3.16+
• The following libraries (installed via package manager):
  • GLFW3
  • GLM

External Dependencies

Before building, you need to download these header-only libraries:

1. volk: Download from https://github.com/zeux/volk

   • Place volk.h and volk.c in external/volk/

2. VMA: Download from https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/VulkanMemoryAllocator

   • Place vk_mem_alloc.h in external/vma/

Building

1. Download external dependencies:

./download_dependencies.sh

2. Install shader compiler (if not already installed):

# On macOS:
brew install glslang

# On Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt-get install glslang-tools

# Or install Vulkan SDK from https://vulkan.lunarg.com/

3. Compile the shaders:

./compile_shaders.sh

4. Build the project:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

5. Run the demo:

./boing_ball

Architecture

The demo uses:

• VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering for simplified rendering (no render pass objects)
• Push constants for per-object transforms and parameters
• Uniform buffer for camera, lighting, and time
• Procedurally generated icosphere mesh
• Three separate pipelines: ball, floor, and shadow

Controls

• Close window to exit
• Window is resizable

Implementation Details

• Ball: Icosphere with spherical UV mapping and checker pattern in fragment shader
• Floor: Large quad with world-space checker pattern
• Shadow: Flattened sphere rendered with alpha blending
• Physics: Simple harmonic motion with gravity and bounce mechanics