Valve Working on GNU/Linux Native Open Source OpenGL Debugger

jones_supa writes "OpenGL debugging has always lagged behind DirectX, mainly because of the excellent DX graphics debugging tools shipping with Visual Studio and GL being left with APITrace. Valve's Linux initiatives are making game companies to think about OpenGL, and the video game company wants to create a good open source OpenGL debugger to improve the ecosystem. AMD and Nvidia have already expressed interest in helping them out. Valve has been developing VOGL mostly on Ubuntu-based distributions under Qt Creator. The software currently supports tracing OpenGL 1.0 through 3.3 (core and compatibility), and is expected to eventually support OpenGL 4.x. Many more details on VOGL can be found at Valve's Rich Geldreich's blog." This looks much nicer than BuGLe. Valve is using Mercurial for version control and they plan to throw it up on bitbucket under an unspecified open source license soon. It works with clang and gcc, but debugging with gcc is currently very slow (hopefully something that can be fixed once the source is available and the gcc hackers can see what's going on). The tracer's internal binary log format can be converted into JSON for use with other tools as well.

Re:Very nice

[Trepidity]

OpenGL's documentation is poorly written where it's needed most and most of the examples you find online are really old, targeted at hardware that was successfully phased out several years ago.

Huge problem with books, too. Most OpenGL books are still about the old fixed-function, immediate-mode pipeline, and if they introduce "modern OpenGL" at all, it's somewhere later in the book as an advanced feature. Partly this is because many of them serve sort of double-duty, as intro-to-graphics and intro-to-OpenGL textbooks, and immediate mode with fixed-function pipeline actually is easier to use pedagogically if your goal is to introduce people to graphics and the OpenGL code is just an example, not intended for production. But retained mode and shaders is not an "advanced feature" anymore from a coding perspective, just the way things are done.

This is even true in new editions of textbooks, because publishers are lazy and often don't really update the textbook. Therefore a (c) 2012 book might still be >85% full of early-2000s content, depending on the book. The only two OpenGL books I know of, besides giant reference tomes, that take a "modern OpenGL" approach through-and-through, are the sixth edition of Interactive Computer Graphics [amazon.com] (which is actually revised), and Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming [arcsynthesis.org], a work-in-progress textbook that's been slowly appearing online over the past two years (sections I-IV are now complete, V and VI still being written).

Re:Open Source! At least it isnt DRM laden like St

[Swarley]

So steam has somewhere to put the games it downloads for you. This really isn't that complicated. Game producers determine the DRM. If the producer chooses none then Steam downloads the files to the steam directory and keeps them up to date for you if you log in and launches the game for you if you log in. OR you can move the files wherever you want and log in or not and the game works just fine. Don't let reality get in the way of your anti-DRM narrative though.

Re:Open Source! At least it isnt DRM laden like St

[Trepidity]

It's difficult as a regular Steam user to get that distinction right, though, because the interface is completely non-transparent about which games have DRM and which don't. You cannot filter the list of available games by "DRM-free only" and choose to vote with your dollars for those. And the majority of games do have DRM (either third-party or Steamworks), so buying blindly is unlikely to get you a DRM-free title. That's a difference with GOG, because there you can know what you're buying is DRM-free.

There are some third-party sites that are attempting to compile the consumer information [pcgamingwiki.com] that Steam doesn't want to give you, but it's a bit hit-or-miss, and most Steam users don't know about such lists.

Re:Very nice

[TyFoN]

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook Second Edition [amazon.com] is a book purely about OpenGL 4.x that I enjoyed.

You might have a look at that too :)
It's still fairly basic though, but it does not contain any of the old opengl cruft.

Re:Very nice

[TyFoN]

Working URL of the book. [amazon.com]
Sorry about that.

Re:Very nice

[Trepidity]

Ah yeah, the SEO-style Web 3.0 URLs, where you guess which part is actually significant. :) On Amazon, the /dp/00000000 part is the real URL, and the /Seo-Friendly-Title-Inserted-Here/ part is SEO-bait garbage that's completely ignored from a technical perspective. So you can leave it out if you want, and http://www.amazon.com/dp/1782167021/ [amazon.com] works. But including only the SEO-bait part of the URL doesn't work, because it doesn't successfully locate resources.