VizWorld.com

Writing code in GLSL can be a bit of a pain when you’re used to the luxury of more modern languages like C++ which offer nice API’s for complex mathematics.  The GLM project provides a set of C++ style functions suitable for use in GLSL and other high-level GPU languages to compute vectors, roots, quaternions, and other detailed mathematics.

GLM 0.9.0.0 is finally available! It brings various API changes from GLM 0.8.4.X branch which makes it not backward compatible. GLM is now compatible with Objective C++ to be used for MacOS X and iPhone projects.

The example code on their site is far easier to understand than most GLSL code I’ve seen, using “normal” looking functions for square roots and vector arithmetic.

via OpenGL Mathematics: News.

Science glm, glsl, sdk

If you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE for development and write any shader code (GLSL, HLSL, CG, etc) then you definitely should check out NShader.  It’s a free addon that adds syntax highlight for those languages, making Visual Studio a much more fully functional IDE for those who work in shader languages.  It does have a few limitations:

• The CG syntax highlighter is using the same HLSL syntax highlighter (they have similar keywords).
• No syntax analyzing and checking. NShader only use a basic tokenizer to extract keywords. Future versions may include syntax analyser.
• No braces/bracket matching
• No completion
• No formatting

But given how poor Visual Studio’s existing support is, it’s a huge benefit.

via NShader – HLSL – GLSL – CG – Shader Syntax Highlighter AddIn for Visual Studio.

Science glsl, hlsl, plugin, programming, visual studio

Recently we reported that the Khronos Group released the specifications for OpenGL 4.0 at GDC. Now, Iain Thomson from V3.co.uk interviews Neil Trevett from the Khronos Group about OpenGL 4.0. Neil talks a little bit about the history of OpenGL and where it is headed to in the future. You can click the link below to see the video, which is about 5 minutes 30 seconds long.

via GDC 2010: Khronos Group discusses OpenGL 4 – V3.co.uk.

Science glsl, khronos, opengl

Nick Haemel has a great short “cliff-notes” version of the new OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 announcement over at FireUser.com, covering some of the important new aspects in relation to application developers.

OpenGL 4.0 includes all of OpenGL 3.3 plus a slew of new stuff including enhanced blending, indexed drawing from buffer objects and enhanced transform feedback functionality. It also provides access to double precision floating point data types in shaders, key for compute, design, and digital content creation where precision is critical. New texture functionality allows for advanced texture gather fetches, new texture buffer formats and cube map array textures.

He also discusses the new tessellation support and GLSL improvements.

via OpenGL releases breathe new life into existing graphics hardware & pave the way for next gen GPUs | FireUser Blog.

Science glsl, opengl

For those of you working with OpenGL Shaders via GLSL, the freely available glslDevil tool offers a great way to interactively debug and manipulate these shaders kn real-time on both Windows and Linux.

glslDevil is a tool for debugging the OpenGL shader pipeline, supporting GLSL vertex and fragment programs plus the recent geometry shader extension. By transparently instrumenting the host application it allows for debugging GLSL shaders in arbitrary OpenGL programs without the need to recompile or even having the source code of the host program available. The debug data is directly retrieved from the hardware pipeline and can be used for visual debugging and program analysis.

Binaries are available at their site.  I’m not sure, how prevalent is GLSL in the wake of new technologies?

via glslDevil – OpenGL GLSL Debugger.

Science debug, glsl, opengl, software