Coder Vil

Apple announced details of OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" today. For anyone who writes cross-platform graphics software, one of the biggest bits of news was that it will finally support OpenGL 4. Specifically: OS X 10.9 will support the OpenGL 4.1 Core Profile This info comes from their release notes . I haven't been able to find any info about supported extensions yet. While welcome, the news is still a bit disappointing. OpenGL 4.1 is now a 3 year old standard, so I'd hoped for something a bit more recent. I believe the Intel HD4000 and HD5000 chips used the MacBook Air & Pro only support up to OpenGL 4.1, so I guess that played a part in the decision.  OS X will be still be the lowest common denominator for OpenGL, relative to Windows and Linux; but at least the denominator is not quite as low any more!

Today I spent a few minutes writing a Makefile. I think they may turn out to be some of the most effective minutes I've ever spent. At work we build using SCons . When I change a single source file, rebuilding takes between 50 and 65 seconds. That's more than long enough to lose my focus and get distracted, so to stay productive I have to work in larger batches. I code in longer bursts and recompile less often, so that the ratio of productive time to down time stays up; unfortunately that also means fewer opportunities to test my changes. That's not ideal, but it's manageable much of the time. Not at the moment though. Right now I'm developing an algorithm where I need to be able to quickly try out different approaches for each of the steps. In this situation I really want to see the effect of each change in isolation, so I can't batch up my coding. All of a sudden those 50 second build times are a real problem. I spent a little while looking into ways to

This is a follow-up to my earlier post "WebGL doesn't have query objects" . Since I wrote that post, the situation has changed a bit. It's still true to say that WebGL doesn't have query objects, but the underlying reason - that OpenGL ES doesn't - is no longer true. For OpenGL ES 2.0 , there's an extension which provides basic query functionality: EXT_occlusion_query_boolean  (which seems to have been based on ARB_occlusion_query2 from regular OpenGL). For OpenGL ES 3.0 , the functionality from that extension appears to have been adopted into the standard. The extension provides two query types, both of which set a boolean value to indicate whether any pixels passed the depth and stencil tests. While this is progress, unfortunately it's still not sufficient to implement the pixel accurate collision detection method I described in an earlier post. For that purpose it's not enough to know whether any  pixels passed the tests; you want to kno

If you use QtCreator for what it calls " generic projects " I've written a little script which might be useful for you: https://github.com/vilya/newfiles This script will rescan your project directories to see whether any files & include directories have been added or removed and update the QtCreator project files accordingly - something QtCreator isn't yet able to do for itself. It has a few extra features too, such as whitelisting or blacklisting paths using shell-style wildcards. See the README file at the link above for more details.