Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Tracing Your OpenGL Application with Vogl Just Got Easier!

VoglEditor now has support for launching and tracing your application, directly from the UI. Previously, (and still available) you'd have to launch your application from the command line, which could add confusion on where to supply vogl or application command line arguments.
> cd vogl_build/bin  
> VOGL_CMD_LINE="--vogl_tracefile vogltrace.glxspheres64.bin" 
  LD_PRELOAD=$(readlink -f libvogltrace64.so) ./glxspheres64 
Also, it is not clear what options vogl has to control its tracing behavior; what would you run to find out those options?!? (Answer: there actually is no executable to run which will provide that help information, but the information is at the bottom of this post)

Generate Trace


The new addition to VoglEditor is available via a "Generate Trace" button on the main toolbar, and provides a clean interface for launching your application as well as setting some common command line options.





Application to trace: Path to the application that you'd like to trace.
Application arguments: Command line arguments to your application.
Output trace file: Path to the resulting trace file.
vogl options:
  • Use SteamLauncher
    •  When launching a Steam game, this is the preferred approach to enable tracing, although you'll need to sync the vogl_chroot repo to get the script. If the script is not available, the option will be disabled.
    • You should already have Steam running prior to using this option, otherwise the client may appear to hang after the application has closed.
    • The dialog asking to load the new trace file may pop-up before the application has been launched; this is due to the way that the script works. Please wait until AFTER you exit your application to load the trace file.
    • Application arguments are not currently supported by the script.
    • The "Application to trace" should be the game ID, or one of the following pre-configured names:
      • 214910 - AirConflicts
      • 400       - Portal1
      • 218060 - BitTripRunner
      • 570       - Dota2
      • 35720   - Trine2
      • 440       - TF2
      • 41070   - Sam3
      • 1500     - Darwinia
      • 550       - L4D2
      • 1500     - Darwinia2
      • 570       - Dota2Beta
      • 221810 - TheCave
      • 220200 - KerbalSpaceProgram
      • 44200   - GalconFusion
      • 201040 - GalconLegends
      • 25000   - Overgrowth
      • 211820 - Starbound
  • 64-bit
    • Enable if your application is 64-bit
  • Force debug context
    • Force the OpenGL Debug Context so that additional driver performance information can be output
  • Gather call stacks
    • If your application has been compiled with symbols, this will tell the tracer to gather a call stack at every OpenGL API call
  • Disable glProgramBinary
    • Applications which use binary programs will be able to replay on the same driver and hardware as they were traced, but may not replay correctly after updating the graphics driver, or replaying on a different platform. To solve this, the tracer can disable the GL_ARB_get_program_binary extension and will force all calls to glProgramBinary() to fail, which should cause your application to take a fallback path. These calls should replay correctly and the replayed stream will reflect the fallback path of your application.
The trace will complete when your application exits, and VoglEditor will ask you if you'd like to load the resulting trace file, allowing you to quickly dive in and identify any rendering artifacts.

Command Line Vogl Tracing Options

Although the UI only supports 3 of the vogl tracing options, a lot more are available at the command line and we plan to integrate UI support for these functionalities in the future. My apologees for not adding detailed help for these options, but I believe the names themselves should be sufficient, and the code is available if you wish to understand them more thoroughly ;-)
  • "vogl_dump_gl_full"
  • "vogl_dump_gl_calls"
  • "vogl_dump_gl_buffers"
  • "vogl_dump_gl_shaders"
  • "vogl_sleep_at_startup <duration>"
  • "vogl_pause"
  • "vogl_long_pause"
  • "vogl_quiet"
  • "vogl_debug"
  • "vogl_verbose"
  • "vogl_flush_files_after_each_call"
  • "vogl_flush_files_after_each_swap"
  • "vogl_disable_signal_interception"
  • "vogl_logfile <filename>"
  • "vogl_logfile_append"
  • "vogl_tracefile <output trace filename>"
  • "vogl_tracepath <path for generated files>"
  • "vogl_dump_png_screenshots"
  • "vogl_dump_jpeg_screenshots"
  • "vogl_jpeg_quality"
  • "vogl_screenshot_prefix <prefix for files>"
  • "vogl_hash_backbuffer"
  • "vogl_dump_backbuffer_hashes <filename>"
  • "vogl_sum_hashing"
  • "vogl_null_mode"
  • "vogl_force_debug_context"
  • "vogl_disable_client_side_array_tracing"
  • "vogl_disable_gl_program_binary"
  • "vogl_func_tracing"
  • "vogl_backtrace_all_calls"
  • "vogl_backtrace_no_calls"
  • "vogl_exit_after_x_frames <frame count>"

Thursday, May 8, 2014

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.