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For a beginner, it's a frustrating process. OpenGL's primary way of letting you know you messed up is by giving you a blank screen. This is much alleviated whe

For a beginner, it's a frustrating process. OpenGL's primary way of letting you know you messed up is by giving you a blank screen. This is much alleviated when you use a wrapper around OpenGL (e.g. Rust's `gfx`), but most people start with raw OpenGL.

vvanders 9y ago
That doesn't change with Vulkan, screw up a transform/shader math/vertex format and you'll also end up with a blank screen. Ironically there's a bunch more debuggers that work with OpenGL as opposed to Vulkan(or know how to debug you're way out of a blank screen by tweaking shaders/api calls to eliminate things).
- and0 9y ago
  The DirectX graphics debugger in Visual Studio is a godsend. It lets you analyze ever call and check every buffer for any "snapshot" of a frame you take. Very easy to identify things like misaligned data, etc, that would be impossible to find otherwise. (This feature broke on my desktop, though, and I still can't fix it for the life of me, but I'm past that point in my project development anyway.)
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Yup, most mobile GPU vendors have similar things for Android and they're incredibly useful for debugging and profiling.
    - hrydgard 9y ago
      There's also RenderDoc available for Windows and Linux and maybe more, it's not great with OpenGL but excellent for debugging Vulkan and D3D11.
      - mellinoe 9y ago
        I know it doesn't work with OpenGL ES, but RenderDoc works well on regular OpenGL apps, from my experience.