GoCL

GoCL — Cross‑Generational Vulkan Engine

GoCL (Gestalt Open Computing Language) is a lightweight static Vulkan library and a runtime proxy layer that adapts to the hardware it runs on. It detects GPU capabilities at startup, rewrites shaders when needed, selects texture compression paths based on memory and format support, and exposes runtime tuning through a plain‑text config file.

The same binary runs on integrated laptop graphics, handheld‑class devices, and high‑end discrete GPUs — no platform‑specific builds.

Key highlights

Automatic shader emulation – unsupported features are rewritten before the driver sees them, enabling modern shaders on older hardware.
Adaptive texture compression – ASTC when available, ETC2 fallback everywhere else, with configurable aggressiveness.
Two ways to use it – link the static library into your own engine, or inject the proxy into pre‑built Vulkan games without recompilation.
Zero per‑frame overhead – shader patching happens once at pipeline creation; texture transcoding is lazy; indirect‑draw batching has no cost when idle.

Using GoCL

As a static library (build your own game)

Link against GoCL_core.a and include the headers from src/. Your application gains:

Hardware‑adaptive rendering (capability oracle)
Runtime shader emulation (FP16, Int8, Int16, SER, descriptor splitting)
Intelligent texture compression (ASTC block selector + ETC2 fallback)
VRAM budget tracking and pipeline cache persistence
Software VRS emulation and meshlet‑based culling utilities
Fully configurable via GoCL.conf

-DGOCL_ENABLE_LAYER=ON to CMake. Deploy it with LD_PRELOAD (Linux) or by placing it alongside the game executable (Windows). The proxy intercepts Vulkan calls and transparently applies all of GoCL’s optimisations:

Patches shaders before they reach the driver
Transcodes ASTC textures to ETC2 on GPUs without hardware decode
Tunes swap‑chain image count and present mode from GoCL.conf
Splits large indirect draw calls into GPU‑friendly batches

The proxy is a Vulkan implicit layer that can be activated by setting ENABLE_GOCL_LAYER=1 and pointing VK_LAYER_PATH to the build directory. It also works as a classic LD_PRELOAD shim on Linux or vulkan‑1.dll proxy on Windows.

No game modifications are required — the same config file controls both the engine and the proxy. For full details, see DETAILS.md.

Recommended Hardware for Measurable Results

NVIDIA – Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Turing
AMD – GCN 1–5, RDNA 1/2/3
Intel – Gen6 through Arc Alchemist
ARM Mali – Bifrost and Valhall
Qualcomm Adreno – 5xx and newer
Software renderers – SwiftShader, Mesa LLVMpipe

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/thee3rdplayer/GoCL.git
cd GoCL
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DGOCL_ENABLE_TESTS=ON -DGOCL_ENABLE_LAYER=ON
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

# Run a Sascha Willems example (replace with your built example binary)
./path/to/SaschaWillems/example/binary

# Inject the proxy into an existing Vulkan game (Linux) 
LD_PRELOAD=./build/vulkan_proxy.so ./your_game  

# Windows (PowerShell / Command Prompt)
ren vulkan_proxy.dll vulkan-1.dll
# Move the renamed vulkan-1.dll into the game’s .exe folder.

Caution

Anticheat Detection: Modern anticheats (like Easy Anti-Cheat or BattlEye) use heuristics to detect anomalies. A proxy layer introduces behaviour deviation that these heuristics are trained to recognize.

The Ban Logic: While proxy games can be played online, playing them in a context where the anticheat expects standard game behavior (direct OS calls, no bypass layer) causes the detection engine to flag the user as a threat, resulting in account suspension.

Documentation

ARCHITECTURE.md – design and subsystem overview
DETAILS.md – configuration reference, build guide, proxy usage, profiling, and platform notes