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Valve's OpenGL debugger open-sourced
- ChrisClark 13y agoWell, now people can sure stop complaining that Valve is only using GitHub for the issue tracker. ;)
- kcbanner 13y agoAwesome!
- orik 13y agoWow- Valve's on a roll! I wonder what else we will see open sourced from them in the next couple of weeks. They're probably talk more about whatever they're up to at GDC this year.
- hayksaakian 13y agoIt's a good sign that companies like Valve and Sony are releasing some of their tools to the public. Perhaps they're feeling the pressure of more open/accessible tools like unity or unreal engine.
- nknighthb 13y ago"Valve and Sony" are apples and oranges. Valve hasn't been a publisher (in the usual sense) or a platform creator until very recently. They've been a retailer and a developer. As a retailer, Valve has an incentive to grow the industry as a whole, and as a developer, they have an incentive to get people onto platforms that are easy for them to develop and sell products for. They've chosen to tackle these interests by deliberately doing things "wrong" right from the beginning. SteamOS/Steambox is all about having an open, accessible platform, and the release of development tools is all about getting people to develop for this platform so that users will adopt it.
- zurn 13y agoI'd be willing to generalize that it's nice to see fruits available.
- m_darkTemplar 13y agoUnity isn't exactly "open," it's actually closed source which can be a big pain if something goes wrong. Compared to traditional game development where usually you have access to all the source it is a big pain (for me at least).
- pjmlp 13y ago> Compared to traditional game development where usually you have access to all the source it is a big pain (for me at least). Which commercial engines do offer full source code access?
- forrestthewoods 13y agoAny 3rd party engine used by a AAA game will have full source. Unreal Engine, Crytek, Source, etc. Sometimes those engines have cheap, no-source indie targeted licenses but the high end games paying the high price tag has source.
- pjmlp 13y agoThanks for the info.
- noct 13y agoAll of them? It's unheard of at a AAA development level to sell an engine without full source access; CryENGINE, Unreal, iD Tech, and Gamebryo all offer full source licenses, to name a few examples.
- pjmlp 13y agoThanks for the info.
- aspensmonster 13y agoNow how about that cool drill-down tool I've been hearing about :D Edit: I'm... I'm an idiot! Apparently this is the tool I'm thinking of, or at least something similar.
- kyrra 13y agoNote that they have a listserv website setup, but the top level domain doesn't seen to host anything yet. http://lists.voglproj.com/listinfo.cgi/dev-voglproj.com http://lists.voglproj.com/listinfo.cgi/dev-voglproj.com
- notastartup 13y agoCan someone explain what is the significance of this and the applications? What does it mean by opengl capture and playback debugger?
- olefoo 13y agoopengl [1] is the graphics library that underpins most of the animation and rendering that games ( and your browser ) do. This app allows you to trace and capture events in code that calls openGL and to follow what's actually happening. 1. http://www.opengl.org/ http://www.opengl.org/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- edderly 13y agoValve need to encourage game devs from a console and windows centric world to develop for the SteamEngine platform. PIX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIX_%28Microsoft%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIX_%28Microsoft%29) is one of the tools these developers are used to dealing with. So having a Linux equivalent is pretty valuable.
- fafner 13y agoIt can capture all OpenGL drawing commands made by an application and then replay it frame by frame. Valve devs gave a presentation about it including a demo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O7WTc6k2Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O7WTc6k2Y The part about vogl starts at around 33 minutes and the demo at 40 minutes.
- flohofwoe 13y agoHistorically the state of OpenGL debugging and profiling tool is quite a mess unfortunately, especially on OSX and Linux. D3D always came with a matching PIX for capture-analysis (capture frames and step through them), and NVIDIA's PerfHUD for live-analysis (analyse the running game with a realtime overlay). For OpenGL there was gDebugger which was commercial, then free, and hasn't been updated in years and probably is stuck to an old GL version. Then there's NVIDIA Nsight which seems to be limited to NVIDIA GPUs (but has a very nice VisualStudio integration). Apple only seems to care about GLES on iOS, not desktop GL. So VOGL could really fill a gap.
- hrjet 13y agoFor someone not familiar with the Valve stack, does this work with any OpenGL application? Or is it only for those using Valve's SDK?
- joeld42 13y agoThis replaces the opengl dynamic library, similar to apitrace. It should work for any opengl app (the example they use is a simple gl app that draws some spheres). When the app makes an opengl call, it logs it to tmp before forwarding it on to the real opengl library. It's kind of like strace for graphics... Then, there are tools to analyze and inspect those logs. You can presumably replay a frame, and step through each GL call and inspect the data it is sending. I haven't tried building this yet, but it looks like it includes a tool to replay the GL calls, and some kind of interactive GUI.
- dsaravel 13y agoI have been checking the code for the generation of the spheres. I never developed C++ professionally. Is this code considered good C++ practice? I mean I saw "using namespace std", and exceptions using cout.
- seabrookmx 13y agoIf it's just a simple demo app, I probably wouldn't use it as a example of good C++ practice. Many C++ devs have a different idea on what idiomatic C++ should look like. C++11 really shakes things up as well. There's no reason a "using namespace std;" is bad, as long as it isn't in the header. If it's in the header file, every file that includes that header will have it's namespace polluted with std declarations, and this leads to a big nasty chain of potential name conflicts (one header file includes another and so on and so forth).
- dsaravel 13y agoRight, it makes perfect sense. Thanks for that.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- beefsack 13y agoNot just open source, but free under the MIT licence. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl/blob/master/LICENSE
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- blackdivine 13y agoReally love what Valve is doing here. Game development needs some awesome opensource love.
- fafner 13y agoA presentation from the developers about vogl and ToGL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O7WTc6k2Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O7WTc6k2Y The part about vogl starts at around 33 minutes and a demo at 40 minutes.
- clarry 13y agoIs there a system on which vsnprintf doesn't NUL-terminate the string after a successful non-zero return?
- ramchip 13y agoVC++, if the number of characters to write is exactly equal to count, will return count without inserting a null: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1kt27hek.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1kt27hek.aspx
- clarry 13y agoIncredible.. thanks. For longer strings, it also seems to return -1 instead of doing what the standard says.
- vrodic 13y agoHopefully they'll use it to make Dota 2 for Linux comparable to Dota 2 for Windows :) Right now it doesn't perform well at all (using 2x more memory and being significantly slower on Intel GPUs) , and still comes with an annoying sound bug (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2/issues/770 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2/issues/770)
- Kayou 13y agoIt may be related to Intel's drivers, as I am playing Team Fortress 2 on Linux, which is I believe native OpenGL, and it is significantly slower than on Windows with an intel GPU.
- green7ea 13y agoI think it is since I get a higher frame rate for Team Fortress 2 under Linux than under windows. I use the nvidia blob.
- strebler 13y agoFor anyone doing GLSL work, here's a shader debugger that is quite useful: http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/glsldevil/ http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/glsldevil/ Would love to see someone with resources (i.e. Valve) somehow maintain it (or do something similar). Here's an open source fork: http://glsl-debugger.github.io/ http://glsl-debugger.github.io/
- DocSavage 13y agoThere's a built-in WebGL shader editor in Aurora that's very slick: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/live-editing-webgl-shaders-with-firefox-developer-tools/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/live-editing-webgl-shaders... Nice to be able to alter your GLSL and see the results on the web page immediately.