Little Star

Game demo utilizing Vulkan for real-time, physically-based simulation and rendering on the GPU

Watch on YouTube | Play on Windows

Features

• simulation of soft, deformable bodies and thousands of particles via XPBD
• Frostbite rendering model with optional cel shading
• third-person camera on a spherical world
• import of (animated) glTF models

Objective

The light of the little star is fading. Collect star particles and bring them back to the star to regenerate its light.

Controls

• Escape – Toggle cursor lock
• C – Toggle cel shading
• W|A|S|D – Move
• Shift – Run
• Mouse – Rotate camera
• Scroll – Adjust camera distance

Build

1. Install Git, Git LFS, CMake, a build tool like Ninja, a C++20 compiler (tested are Clang on macOS and MSVC on Windows), and the Vulkan SDK.
2. Clone the repository using Git.
3. Configure and build the demo using CMake. You can also do this in an IDE like Visual Studio (Code).
4. Run the demo executable.

Credits

• Animated Astronaut Character in Space Suit Loop by LasquetiSpice is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Book Pattern by Rob Tuytel is licensed under CC0 1.0.
• Brown Leather by Rob Tuytel is licensed under CC0 1.0.
• Caveat by Pablo Impallari is licensed under OFL 1.1.
• CGI Moon Kit by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio is licensed under CC0 1.0.
• Deep Star Maps 2020 by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio is licensed under CC0 1.0.

Dependencies

• Dear ImGui
• DirectX Shader Compiler
• GLFW
• GLM (OpenGL Mathematics)
• KTX (Khronos Texture)
• MikkTSpace
• MshIO
• SoLoud
• stb
• TinyGLTF
• tinyobjloader
• Vulkan
• Vulkan-Hpp
• Vulkan Memory Allocator
• VulkanMemoryAllocator-Hpp

References

• An Isotropic 3x3 Image Gradient Operator
• A Survey on Position Based Dynamics, 2017
• Barycentric Coordinates
• Bitonic Sort
• Fast Tetrahedral Meshing in the Wild
• glTF 2.0 Specification
• KHR_materials_pbrSpecularGlossiness
• KTX File Format Specification
• Moving Frostbite to Physically Based Rendering 3.0
• MSH file format
• Optimized Spatial Hashing for Collision Detection of Deformable Objects
• Optimizing GPU occupancy and resource usage with large thread groups
• Particle Simulation using CUDA
• Physically Based Rendering in Filament
• Physically Based Shading at Disney
• Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4
• Shadow Map Antialiasing
• Small Steps in Physics Simulation
• Vulkan 1.3 Specification