Hi Wojciech,
Am 20.04.12 17:28, schrieb Wojciech Lewandowski:
We want to port an OSG program to Ipad. This was once written on Windows.
We already gathered some experience on OSG/GLES when porting it to
Android.
And now its time for IOS. We are completely fresh on IOS Mac programming,
though. So fresh, we don't even own a Mac for development station, yet.
In
preparation for the task I was looking on OSG site and mailing list for
some guidance. My overall impression is not too rosy, though. I've found
posts that CMake does not work with XCode and XCode project has a
separate
manually maintained repo. Since I am a such a newbie on the topic I can't
figure out how severe the whole picture is and how easy or messy attempt
could be. So I decided to just start a small poll and ask these few
questions directly:
CMake and XCode:
XCode is now distributed via the mac app store, the app resides in the
app-folder, and not as in previous versions in a dedicated folder called
"/Developer" Older versions of Cmake required that xcode lives in
/Developer. This broke project generation for xcode. Fortunately the
nightly builds available at cmake.org include a bug fix, so cmake is
working again for os x and ios.
CMake generated project files vs hand-maintained xcode-project files on
github (https://github.com/stmh/osg/tree/iphone
cmake:
+ project files for most of the plugins
- generated project files work either for the simulator or for the
device (you'll need two xcode project files for sim and device)
- no working example app
hand-maintained xcode-project-files via github branch:
+ project can compile libs for device and lib
+ project can be embedded in other xcode-project and xcode can resolve
all dependencies automatically.
+ working examples
- only a handful plugins are supported
- Is IOS/OSG environment mature enough to attempt a more advanced
application than test samples ?
I think it's stable enough to do serious work. AFAIK there are some apps
in the wild from Thomas Hogarth and I published a small app two weeks ago.
- For larger app would you recommend XCode or command line Cmake build ?
AFAIK It's necessary to use xcode for building an ipad app (codesigning
for example), but you can compile your xcode project from the
commandline using xcodebuild, which works good enough. I'd recommend
xcode.
- I have read that XCode can be quite unresponsive with OSG project on
Mac
mini. Could you recommend some minimal HW configuration to handle the
environment and allow for comfortable work ?
yes, that's true, xcode need a lot of cycles to open and munge the
osg-project files, you can avoid this by compiling the osg libs and
-plugins with xcodebuild via the command line; and, you'll do this only
once to get a set of libs you can use for your further development tasks.
So, basically you compile your osg libs and plugins once, set up your
project and use the libs from there. Working on your own project with
xcode is fast and flawless, so no worry about that. (linking will take
its time though)
A recent mac with plenty of RAM (xcode tends to use all available RAM it
can get) and a lot of cores :) will suffice. I think an midsized
quadcore iMac would be a good start. I do most of my development with a
two year old MacBookPro with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD and on a four year
old quad core Mac Pro.
- Can OSG/GLES program be tested on IPAD emulator on Mac ? We could not
do
it with Android (last week version of Android SDK supposedly changes
that)
?
If you compile osg for simulator and device, and adjust the project
settings accordingly then you can test your app on the simulator and on
the device. In my experience the simulator is slower than the actual
device and you'll notice some artefacts/errors when rendering opengl es
from within the simulator.
I have a set of universal libs of osg which work for the device and for
the simulator. If there's any interest I can share them online. (Built
from the handmaintained xcode-project via github)
The hard part with osg + ios is to get a set of working libs for
simulator and device. If you have your libs and plugins in place
development is as easy as with other platforms besides the longer
compile-test/debug-on-device-cycles.
- OSG development on Android in my opinion is far from perfect situation
(comparing to Linux or Windows). If you had an experience with both
Android
and IOS can you just say if development for IPAD is simpler or tougher ?
I don't have any experience with android, but when you have a set of osg
libs ready for development, the experience is quite good. As xcode
compiles your code while you are typing most of the common errors are
spotted in realtime. The link times are really long, most notably for
debug builds.
Here's my personal setup:
* I am using the handmaintained xcode-project files mostly because I do
not need all the plugins
* I have a dedicated old mini with continuous integration via hudson,
which checks the iphone branch from github for changes and compiles all
libs and plugins for simulator/device/debug/release. Via a shell script
I combine the simulator and device libs to create so-called universal
libs. If nothing went wrong headers, libs and plugins get committed to
subversion automatically.
* I am using xcode for my ios-apps, setting include-paths and header
paths accordingly and that's it.
* Most of the time i do release builds for testing, as linking the
debug-targets takes a reasonable amount of time and are slow on the
device and on the simulator.
hope that helps.
cheers,
Stephan
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