pilka 🔩

Pilka is a cross-platform democoding tool for creating shader* demos, similar to Bonzomatic or KodeLife. Supports hot-reloading which means resources is checked, updated in the background.

Available features:

Hot-reload
Saving shaders
Taking screenshot
Record video

preview

Controls

F1: Toggles play/pause
F2: Pauses and steps back one frame
F3: Pauses and steps forward one frame
F4: Restarts playback at frame 0 (Time and Pos = 0)
F5: Print parameters
F10: Save shaders
F11: Take Screenshot
F12: Start/Stop record video
ESC: Exit the application
Arrows: Change Pos

Parameters

(per-draw-update)

name	type	range
position	vec3	(-∞, ∞)
time	float	[0, ∞)
resolution	vec2	[0, a]
mouse	vec2	[-1, 1]
spectrum	float	[-1, 1]

Requirements

Vulkan SDK is required.

On recent macOS, to allow sound input to be captured (for FFT textures to be generated), you need to: Open up System Preferences, click on Security & Privacy, click on the Privacy tab then click on the Microphone menu item. Make sure pilka is in the list and ticked... erm, probably. I don't have macOS.

Installation

cargo install pilka

You also can install the application by to downloading the source code and build locally.

# or through ssh git@github.com:pudnax/pilka.git
git clone https://github.com/pudnax/pilka.git
cd pilka
cargo install --path .

Dependencies

winit is the "default" window library in Rust ecosystem. And it covers the most of cross-platform issues for you.

RustFFT is used to perform Fast FFT for generating sound textures.

cpal is used to capture sound from microphone and probably MIDI devices in the future.

png is used to encode screenshots into png files.

notify is a file watcher and maintains the hot-reload.

shaderc is used to compile GLSL shaders on the runtime instead of opening a process with glslc or glslangValidator. I hope to switch to naga soon, when it's mature enough.

ash is a Vulkan bindings. I choose ash because I see pilka as a learning project and want to touch the maximum untouched Vulkan. For the same reason I didn't use vulkano, erupt, vulkanism, etc.

Ffmpeg is used to record and save to video. For my concerns it's temporary solution after which I switch to rav1e on it's release.