2023 Recap and 2024 Plans for OpenSceneGraph and VulkanSceneGraph projects

[robertosfield]

Happy New Year Pixel Pushers :-)

I'm writing this post for both the OpenSceneGraph and VulkanSceneGraph communities, so posting it in both forums. The work I've done over the past years and my plans for the next year affect both communities, and many developers either already straddle both communities or may be looking to do in the future so hopefully will appreciate knowing what is happening on both sides.

2023 Recap

Personally I had an extremely busy year with VulkanSceneGraph development and support, and working with clients consuming all the hours I had available. As an open source developer a great deal of what I do is logged by GitHub - with 2616 commits I averaged over 7 commits a day!

All this work didn't go unnoticed - I was included in OpenUK's 2024 New Year's honours list. I guess that makes me the Honourable Graphics Nerd.

VulkanSceneGraph 2023 releases and major features

I tagged 6 VulkanSceneGraph minor point releases between March and August taking us from VulkanSceneGraph-1.0.3 to 1.0.9. These releases included lots of bug fixes, refinements and new features. Rather than trying to enumerate it all here you can checked out the VulkanSceneGraph/releases page for all the changes.

Between August and December I was focused on developing major new VulkanSceneGraph features - introducing a flexible scheme for pre and post rendering and a visually pleasing Cascaded Shadow Maps implementation. We never got the shadow map support right in the OpenSceneGraph so it's great to come back to this topic afresh and achieve results that are far more robust and easy to use.

The shadowing support is fully integrated into the core scene graph and the vsg::ShaderSet scheme so it's easy to render Physics Based Rendering models with shadows from multiple directional lights:

It also seamlessly handles whole earth models:

All this new functionality and much more was wrapped in the VulkanSceneGraph-1.1.0 release that I tagged last week.

The family of VulkanSceneGraph projects also continues to advance with new releases for vsgXchange, vsgExamples, vsgImGui, vsgQt and a new member of the vsg-dev family - vsgPoints](https://github.com/vsg-dev/) that adds support for paged and quantized point clouds capable of rendering billions of point datasets at 60fps.

In the Spring of 2023 I also begun work on an free online tutorial book - vsgTutorial. I have completed the first 2 chapters and begun the 3rd, but since the Summer 2023 I've been so overrun with other VSG work that I haven't had time to return to the effort to complete it. It takes a lot of time to write detailed documentation so will have to get back to it once I have the opportunity.

@timoore's also continued work on vsgCs that integrates VulkanSceneGraph with Ceisum-ion to provide 3D Tiles datasets, which is now very close to it's first stable release. Cesium were so impressed that offered Tim a job!

@pelicanmapping have also been developing their new Rocky - 3D Geospatial Application Engine, which builds up the VulkanSceneGraph.

Sundog Software closed out 2023 with announcing availability of SilverLining for Vulkan & VulkanSceneGraph.

OpenSceneGraph in 2022/2023

After the first initial VulkanSceneGraph-1..0.0 made in November 2022 I jumped back to the OpenSceneGraph project to review and merge community PR's and make steps towards making another 3.6.6 maintenance release from the OpenSceneGraph-3.6 stable branch. The most notable public facing change was to move from mailing list/broken forum to using GitHub Discussions forum for support.

I also worked on creating new master branch which stripped out my experimental work on shader composition that in hindsight I shouldn't have merged with OSG master right after the 3.6.5.

Unfortunately once we were in 2023 I became so busy with VulkanSceneGraph client and open source work that I had no time to dive properly into OpenSceneGraph support work, so had to fallback to just doing a minimum of answering end user support questions that even now trickle in. Watching the Issue and PRs sit there unanswered sits heavily on me, after years of being so proactive I simply don't have the time and mind space to handle them.

I have to admit that I wince each time I encounter a new developer wanting to learn OpenSceneGraph/OpenGL and use it in their projects, I can understand existing OpenSceneGraph users needing support, but OpenSceneGraph/OpenGL are both legacy APIs that are now just in maintenance mode. OpenGL hasn't had an new release since 4.6 was made in July 2017, and the OSG hasn't had a the 3.6.5 release in January 2020, while neither is ideal it is the state of play. New developers really should be basing their work on modern and thriving APIs, not APIs that are over 20 to 30 years old and a decade beyond their Best Before Date.

Plans for VulkanSceneGraph in 2024

The first half of this year is rapidly filling with client work and open source work, which dispels any romantic notion that I might have time and brain cells left over to tackle other work. Like the rest of the last 5 years I've been working on the VulkanSceneGraph my brain cells are going to being going arrrrhhhhhhhh between episodes of learning new tricks and coming up with hopefully useful ways to fit a scene graph to the needs of modern application developers.

Features I have penciled include:

1. Tone Mapping
2. Percentage Closer Soft Shadows
3. Support for shadows for Spot and Point lights
4. A cascaded view dependent render to texture for rendering high quality overlays
5. vsgIG Framework that will build upon family of VSG projects for vis-sim applications
6. Rewrite the osg2vsg library was written early in the VSG project's life and doesn't leverage all the latest features

Plans for OpenSceneGraph in 2024.

For me the supporting the OpenSceneGraph is all about what we can do to support existing users that have built their applications on top of the OpenSceneGraph. Maintaining the existing API and updating the software to build with new OS's, build tools and 3rd party dependencies needs to be the focus of efforts.

We also need to rebuild elements of the project infrastructure like the website so it is all centrally managed on GitHub in a similar fashion to how the VulkanSceneGraph project works. As the OpenSceneGraph project is now in maintenance mode we need to keep time and financial overhead to a minimum so we can concentrate our scare time resources on maintaining the software not the systems that surround it.

To help make this happen back in November 2023 I hired Chris Djali (@AnyOldName3) on a part-time basis to look at archiving the present OpenSceneGraph website, that is run on Joomla and hosted on Dreamhost, using Github project, and to create a new GitHub pages based OpenSceneGraph website that is more modest and more in keeping with the VulkanSceneGraph project in style and layouts. Once these websites are working well enough I'll redirect openscenegraph.com/.org to new sites and I can close my Dreamhost account. Chris and I will follow up with more details of this work with dedicate thread on openscenegraph forum.

I would love to be able to make a OpenScenegraph-3.6.6 release this year, and then a OpenSceneGraph-3.8 based off the new master. I can't promise anything at this point as I just don't have any room in my schedule for even a weeks work just on the OSG side, let alone the 6 weeks that it typically took to get a stable release tested and debugged and ready for release.

Vulkan is the future and VulkanSceneGraph is my best attempt at making that future user/developer friendly

Khronos has left OpenGL in a coma and on life support for 6 and half years. It's not going to suddenly spring back to life and become relevant for future applications. Khronos is fully behind Vulkan and it's developing fast, support latest hardware features with good developer support. For Khronos OpenGL is legacy, Vulkan is the present and future for low level cross platform graphics APIs.

I see my work on VulkanSceneGraph as crucial for the existing OpenSceneGraph user base - the quicker the VulkanSceneGraph project and it's associated libraries/framework are feature rich enough to tackle all the tasks that the OpenSceneGraph currently provides the sooner the members of the OpenSceneGraph have a safe and friendly harbour in which to dock their projects long term.

I also see examples where developers use middle-ware, like Game Engines,, that are poorly suited to their needs, the world needs scene graphs more than ever - in many ways Vulkan is lower level than OpenGL so the need for middle-ware to encapsulate functionality is crucial for lowering the barrier to entry and improving end results.

Developing Vulkan application needn't be complicated, many tasks are now actually easier to do with the VulkanSceneGraph than it ever was with OpenSceneGraph - for instance Physics Based Rendering and high quality shadows are all available out of the box. For those in the OpenSceneGraph skeptical of Vulkan and this new fanged VulkanSceneGraph please try it out. If there areas that aren't yet up to par with OpenSceneGraph functionality lets us know - together we build a modern scene graph that fits your needs fully.

Dearly departed

GitHub now has a mechanism for passing on responsibility of what to do with accounts when an account holder dies, a write up can be found on the github-deceased-user-policy page.

This isn't critical for my own personal GitHub account but for the openscenegraph and vsg-dev accounts I think it makes sense for us to start discussing seriously how we want to tackle it and how we should involve as backup for if/when the worst happens.

GitHub Sponsorship?

For the past 23 years I have run, OpenSceneGraph Professional Services, my little one man free software business, where I use income from my client work - bespoke development work, consulting, training and support to pay the bills and enable me to dedicate so much time to unpaid Open Source work. Historically I have averaged about 1/3 of my time to client work and 2/3 of my time to unpaid open source development and support work. I have made it work because I'm a mug/love coding/helping folks, but might there be a better way?

Something I get asked about occasionally is about donations and have previously not followed this up as setting things up takes time and the level of income needs to be far more few small $ donations, for it to really make a big different we'll wanting to raise 10's of thousands of dollars each year to cover months of developer time. As GitHub now has Sponsorship support so is it time to look at this seriously?

If you have experience with Sponsoring projects on GitHub or using Sponsorship for your own projects let me know your thoughts/experiences.

Wrapping up

I've covered lots of topics in this post, though it's really just a taster of what's been happening and what will likely unfold, no doubt lots of unexpected things will happen this year like they have in previous years. Feel free to chip in with this thread on the topics covered here, if you want to discuss other topics please create a separate Issue or Discussion thread for them.

All the best for 2024!
Robert Osfield.
VulkanSceneGraph & OpenSceneGraph Project Lead.

[lufriem]

Thank you very much for the update/preview and your ongoing efforts!