Roadmap

1. Exploration Phase, June-September 2018 (completed)

Goal : Establish which technologies and broad techniques to use

Learn and experiment with Vulkan, modern C++, and possible 3rd party dependencies. Experimenting with different approaches to object/scene graph design and implementation. Exploration Phase Materials :

• Principles and Philosophy
• High Level Design Decisions
• Exploration Phase Report
• Areas of Interest
• 3rd Party Resources

2. Prototype Phase, October-December 2018 (completed)

Goal : Rapid prototyping of main classes, library and test applications to establish how the scene graph API will broadly look and work.

Prototype Phase Materials:

• Prototype Phase Workplan
• Prototype Phase Report

3. Core Development Phase, 2021-early 2022 (near completion)

Goal: Create the final class interfaces and implementation

Using the prototyping work as a guide implement the final scene graph library with the aim of creating a solid interface and implementation.

Completed tasks:

• Development of final VSG Library.
• Support for multi-threaded database paging.
• Support for multi-threaded viewer, cull and dispatch traversals.
• Support for multi-pass rendering.
• Support for large scale whole world databases, with double support for scene graph transforms.
• Development of add on libraries that provide:
  • Support for major image formats.
  • Support for major 3D model formats, including FBX, glTF.
  • Support for PBR shaders.
  • Support for Text rendering.
• Development of test suite of programs and data.
• Support for RTX Mesh shaders and ray tracing.
• Scene graph level multi-bin support with bin sorting.
• Support for Khronos ray tracing.
• Memory allocator with support with grouping associated types
• Positional state support to enable easier support of lighting, shadows, texture projection.
• Matrix decomposition
• Port to iOS
• Unified state composer, shader set and cache
• Update vsgXchange::Assimp to use the new state composer/shader set.
• Support for wide and standard strings in vsg::Path.
• Utilize vkEnumerateInstanceVersion
• Update vsgImGui to latest
• Improved support for dynamic scene graphs and dynamic views, dynamic descriptor pool reallocation

Current development tasks:

4. Release Phase, Spring 2022

Goal: Test scene graph library against real-world applications and shake down the API and implementation for it’s first stable release.

• Refinement of API and implementation
• Build relationships with application developers and involve them in testing
• Create tutorial and example programs to illustrate how to use VSG
• Test, debug, refine and release 1.0.0!

Future tasks relating to associated libraries

• Update vsgXchange::OSG to use the new state composer/shader set.
• Rewrite vsgQt handling of keyboard mapping
• Support for integration with OpenGL/OSG applications via EXT_external_object & VK_KHR_external_memory