[cmake] Remove conan package manager and use only CMake instead

[IAmNotHanni]

Please test this!

Closes #522 Closes #512 Closes #501

History

Conan package manager is no longer required, as all dependencies can be downloaded simply through CMake by now. While in my personal opinion CMake has improved a lot over time, conan has not. It has been a constant source of frustration and broken build setups, most importantly our broken CI. Furthermore, I get the impression that almost nobody who comes into our project has any experience with conan, while most people have heard or use CMake. Using CMake+conan is just some thing in our project that has grown over time, but I think it's justified to say goodbye to it.

Note: Because we will no longer use conan to install Vulkan tools, this pull request will reverse https://github.com/inexorgame/vulkan-renderer/pull/491

• [x] Check if there is a way to run all checks only once (not duplicate) when opening a pull request
• [x] Check if all build artifacts are being uploaded correctly
• [x] Build both debug and release configuration in CI
• [x] Remove INEXOR_USE_VMA_RECORDING option (deprecated in VMA 3.0.0)
• [x] Build tests and benchmarks in CI as well
• [x] Integrate volk Vulkan metaloader (#501)
• [x] Get Vulkan headers through CMake
• [x] Fix code style (clang-format)
• [x] Remove unused and irrelevant MeshBuffer template
• [x] Mark Windows clang build as required for passing checks!
• [x] Fix static code analysis (clang-tidy)
• [x] Fix Windows MSVC build
• [x] Fix Windows clang build
• [x] Rebase onto main
• [x] Pick required changes from branch iceflower/conan_cmake
• [x] Test on Windows
• [x] Test on Linux
• [x] Update documentation
• [x] Use actions/upload-artifact@v3
• [x] Squash commits

Outlook

• Run tests in CI as well (tests and benchmarks don't require a gpu)
• Disable warnings from third party libs when building (yeetari's fix)
• Turn on tests and benchmarks in Windows CI again (https://github.com/inexorgame/vulkan-renderer/issues/529)

[IAmNotHanni]

The problem here is that vulkan-1.dll needs to be copied into the correct folder. We had this in issue https://github.com/inexorgame/vulkan-renderer/issues/499 which was fixed in pr https://github.com/inexorgame/vulkan-renderer/pull/502

This issue is because of us statically linking to vulkan runtime. This basically means the application just crashes without our control if the dll is not available on Windows. This gives us no control to display a nice error message. We should be using a metaloder such as volk, as proposed in https://github.com/inexorgame/vulkan-renderer/issues/501.

• [x] Find a solution for the following issue on Windows:

I'm testing this with CMake UI 3.24.2 and Visual Studio 17.5.4 2022 on my Windows 10. I get the following error when I launch inexor-vulkan-renderer-example.

[IAmNotHanni]

• [x] Remove duplicate find_package(Vulkan REQUIRED) in CMakeLists.txt

[IAmNotHanni]

Oh I just see I removed all of python from the docs installation guide, but we need it for the docs itself

• [x] Add installation of python as requirement to docs again

[IAmNotHanni]

• [x] Fix CI:

  CMake Error at /usr/share/cmake-3.24/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:230 (message): Could NOT find Vulkan (missing: Vulkan_LIBRARY Vulkan_INCLUDE_DIR) (found version "")

[IAmNotHanni]

• [x] Fix commit naming

[IAmNotHanni]

Looks like we need to install Vulkan SDK in our workflow: https://github.com/humbletim/setup-vulkan-sdk/blob/main/action.yml

[IAmNotHanni]

On Windows, VMA must be configured with VMA_DYNAMIC_VULKAN_FUNCTIONS 1 and VMA_STATIC_VULKAN_FUNCTIONS 0

EDIT: This is only the case if your (my) outdated graphics card does not support Vulkan 1.3 hahah. I guess it's also time for my new machine to arrive :)

Read more here: https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/VulkanMemoryAllocator/issues/280

Oh man it's really about time we use volk metaloader!

[IAmNotHanni]

What's wrong with the static analysis suddenly?

[IAmNotHanni]

If we download Vulkan through CMake, do we even need to specify the manual download of the full Vulkan SDK in the CI? EDIT: Yes, we need to keep it because of glslangValidator!

[IceflowRE]

What's wrong with the static analysis suddenly?

Fails on third party libraries.

If we download Vulkan through CMake, do we even need to specify the manual download of the full Vulkan SDK in the CI?

Not sure what else we need apart from the headers.

[IAmNotHanni]

@IceflowRE We do use fmt in the instance wrapper directly though:

// This code will throw an exception if the required version of Vulkan API is not available on the system
if (VK_API_VERSION_MAJOR(REQUIRED_VK_API_VERSION) > VK_API_VERSION_MAJOR(available_api_version) ||
    (VK_API_VERSION_MAJOR(REQUIRED_VK_API_VERSION) == VK_API_VERSION_MAJOR(available_api_version) &&
     VK_API_VERSION_MINOR(REQUIRED_VK_API_VERSION) > VK_API_VERSION_MINOR(available_api_version))) {
    std::string exception_message = fmt::format(
        "Your system does not support the required version of Vulkan API. Required version: {}.{}.{}. Available "
        "Vulkan API version on this machine: {}.{}.{}. Please update your graphics drivers!",
        std::to_string(VK_API_VERSION_MAJOR(REQUIRED_VK_API_VERSION)),
        std::to_string(VK_API_VERSION_MINOR(REQUIRED_VK_API_VERSION)),
        std::to_string(VK_API_VERSION_PATCH(REQUIRED_VK_API_VERSION)),
        std::to_string(VK_API_VERSION_MAJOR(available_api_version)),
        std::to_string(VK_API_VERSION_MINOR(available_api_version)),
        std::to_string(VK_API_VERSION_PATCH(available_api_version)));
    throw std::runtime_error(exception_message);
}

So we need to keep fmt as a direct dependency in our CMake setup

[IAmNotHanni]

What's wrong with the static analysis suddenly?

Fails on third party libraries.

If we download Vulkan through CMake, do we even need to specify the manual download of the full Vulkan SDK in the CI?

Not sure what else we need apart from the headers.

We can't leave out the Download of Vulkan SDK because we need glslangValidator. I think keeping it in the CI is the easiest solution, although there might be another way to get.

[IAmNotHanni]

I just enabled building tests and benchmarks for all compilers by default. They must be stable as well when reviewing a pull request. Now that means the tests do not run in CI yet. Our tests don't require a gpu to run. Writing tests which require gpus is way too much work. Benchmarks don't run in CI either, although they would also not require a gpu.

[IceflowRE]

Can i get a small presentation what volk does? What is the difference to what we did before.

[IAmNotHanni]

Can i get a small presentation what volk does? What is the difference to what we did before.

Let me give you an answer that we could copy into our docs right away:

volk Is a meta-loader for Vulkan API written by Arseny Kapoulkine. It allows you to dynamically load the function entrypoints to use Vulkan without linking to any Vulkan dynamic link library or statically linking to the Vulkan loader. This is important, because on Windows for example, without volk the application would crash before the main function is even reached in case Vulkan would not be installed on the system. Without volk, this prevents us completely from displaying a nice error message if the right version of Vulkan is not available.

This is an example of an error message generated by Windows because of missing entrypoints (Note that this error message would show up automatically and we wouldn't be able to run any code or display a nicer error message.):

Volk has another benefit: It can optimize Vulkan device calls by dynamically loading the device-related Vulkan function entrypoints directly from the driver using vkGetDeviceProcAddr. This bypasses the overhead of Vulkan loader's dispatch code, which can come with measurable overhead. Using volk is easy, because once you include it instead of vulkan.h, all Vulkan functions are provided by volk as function pointers. This means you don't need to change Vulkan function calls at all when using volk.

In short: We didn't change our Vulkan function calls, but error handling for missing Vulkan is easier and we might expect a little performance improvement.

Maybe @yeetari can correct me if sth is wrong.

[IAmNotHanni]

• [x] Fix Ubuntu Clang (Release)
• [x] Fix Uploading of artifacts for Windows MSVC (both Debug & Release)