Shared Contexts, Uniforms, ARB Programs, and Buffers get added to VoglEditor

After an extended holiday, a flurry of work has been completed on vogleditor, adding improved support for shared contexts, program uniforms, ARB programs, and visualizing buffer contents. In the meantime, John McDonald has been working on the Windows port, and Rich Geldreich has been adding the final bits of the GL3.3 feature set and making progress on GL4!

Shared Contexts

It turns out that a significant number of games use shared contexts so that resources can be used by multiple contexts and on different threads. Very quickly it became clear that simply supporting the 'current context' was not going to be sufficient.

A drop-down has been added above the state tabs which lists all the available contexts. As expected, the current context is the default selection, and the set of contexts which are shared by each context are indicated.

In the case above, we can see that both the current context 0x84bd954 and context 0x8a9cbd4 share context 0x8533d24. Most OpenGL objects which are created can be accessible by all three contexts; Vogl will represent this by storing these shareable objects in the shared context (0x8533d24), and this can be seen via the objects listed in the state tree (below, left). Other objects (primarily Framebuffer and Vertex Array Objects) are not shareable, and therefore are only listed the corresponding context's state tree (below, right). 

Note that although the shared objects are only listed in the state tree of the owning context, they will appear in the object explorers for all objects that can access those objects.

 

Program Uniforms

... are now visible below the shader source code. The location, name, value, and type can be seen. Currently these values are NOT editable, but it could be an easy addition if someone wants to add it in soon.
 

 

ARB Programs

A new explorer has been added to display ARB Program Objects. These programs only contain source for a single shader type, so there is no drop-down control to select a shader type. This is in contrast to a Program Object which has several shaders attached to it. Instead of uniforms, ARB Programs rely on environment and local parameters, which are always 4 component floating point vectors. The parameters which are used by the program are visible in the bottom half of the explorer. The program source is editable and can be saved and will be used when replaying the trace. Environment and local parameters are not yet editable.

Buffer Objects

Buffer objects can be used to hold arbitrary data - vertex indices, vertex attributes, or even texture data. A single buffer can hold a variety of data types, so the explorer provides a set of common types that you can use to interpret the buffer contents - 8, 16, 32, 64-bit hex, float, double, byte, unsigned byte, short, unsigned short, int, and unsigned int are among the options available.