Hi Ricky,

there's another GL api tracer that might be worth to take a look at:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2011/04/apitrace.html

I've never tried it, but it seems very powerfufl.

I've just spend about an hour getting it compiled (you also have to compile QJson from source, on which it depends).

It works, but it's a far cry from what gDEBugger was.

First of all, it's a wrapper for opengl32.dll, so it will trace everything from the start of your app until you quit. There may be some API you can use to start/stop tracing within your own app, but if not, then it's all or nothing.

That, combined with the fact that it's extremely slow (it slowed my app to about 2-3 seconds per frame when it normally runs at 60hz, and that's for a very small scene) makes it pretty inconvenient to use.

Once you have the trace file, the qapitrace app lets you inspect the trace, and that's pretty well done. It shows the whole GL command stream frame-by-frame, and lets you inspect state, textures, shaders (though in our case, we had 2 fragment shaders and 2 vertex shaders bound in the same Program, and it only showed one of each), and some info about vertex buffers / arrays (though one element at a time - it would be more useful to be able to dump the whole array to inspect it all at once instead of one vertex at a time).

Essentially, some features are missing and the speed needs to be improved. An app that could run your application and let you decide when to start/stop tracing would be nice too. But the basic building blocks are there and it seems stable, so it's a good start.

It's a shame I don't have the bandwidth to help this project at this time, because I think there's a gaping void in this area now, and DirectX has really good tools, so I think it's going to really hurt OpenGL if the void is not filled soon.

J-S
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Jean-Sebastien Guay    [email protected]
                               http://www.cm-labs.com/
                    http://whitestar02.dyndns-web.com/
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