Ananth's very own website » Rants

OpenGL problem

ananth — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:23:49 +0000

I’ve been trying to get Brahma working with OpenGL, and although the code is complete to bring the OpenGL/GLSL provider on par to the DirectX provider (GLSL code is generated, compiles fine), I’m having problems getting results back from the GPU. I really wish OpenGL would DO something about the dreadful uncertainties across versions, vendors and drivers. I got a whiff of something called OpenCL that’s being cooked up. If delivered properly, it might be answer to a lot of woes. Anyway, I digress. There’s enough material there for a whole new post

I’m having problems getting a proper data-round trip between the CPU and GPU (I’m using FBO’s). I’m not sure why that is, but it works if I don’t perform any renders, but just crashes the moment I do. Since I’m at a loss as to what’s going on, I though I’d give a holler to any OpenGL experts out there who can help me figure out what’s going on.

The two unit tests of relevance in this case are

DataRoundTrip
IdentityTransform

Weird. Hope someone can help me figure this out soon, I’d really like to get this baby running on Linux and Mono. Thanks in advance for any help!

SlimDX

ananth — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:23:12 +0000

I just found out about SlimDX, and I think this is perhaps the best news I’ve gotten in a long time. DirectX from Managed code was a god-awful mess, what with MDX 1.1 being frozen and MDX 2.0 thrown out the window. Xna was never really the successor to MDX because it was meant as a game development API and not really a graphics API exposing core GPU functionality to programmers.

Here are some of the reasons a Managed DirectX wins out over Xna. Of course one of my pet peeves is video support for Xna. There are two good threads you can read through about this, here and here. With DirectX 10 support (albeit alpha), this is definitely a move in the right direction.

Adding references to Xna

ananth — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 14:51:17 +0000

Adding a reference to XNA isn’t as simple as it appears, it would seem. According to Stephen Stryrchak (full thread here),

“Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward. The (XNA) redist installs the runtime as a runtime, not as an SDK. The Add Reference dialog doesn’t enumerate assemblies from the GAC, which is where the runtime is installed.

In order to be able to reference the assemblies, you’ll need to copy them out of your GAC after installing the redist, and put them in another folder. Then when you add your references, you’ll need to browse to the folder where you put the copies. At runtime, your game will use the ones from the GAC, but at design-time you need to get them from somewhere else.

Please note also that you will not have Intellisense documentation if you do this. That is, you’ll get statement completion, but there won’t be any descriptions of types, methods, or arguments for any of the XNA Framework types.”

Oh well. Tedious, isn’t it?

How would you change Windows Vista?

ananth — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:55:16 +0000

A friend gave me this link … and I took out the time to write my own comment here. Now that I think about it, it IS an interesting topic. I’ll keep updating a wishlist as I come across new things I need/want in Vista.