RenderMonkey inspired GLSL editor for linux?

[Linsnos]

Hi!

I'm working on a (very basic) OpenGL graphics engine using the programmable pipeline.
You can get some more info about it on my blog
deorbit
(The link URL contain the word "renderman", which of course is something different.)

RenderMonkey was in my view a fantastic tool for prototyping and writing shader code, but the project has been discontinued for quite a while and the application is not for linux.

Now I'm thinking of a use for my simple graphics engine and one idea is to create an open source alternative for linux (initially). One reason for the abandonment of such IDE's/tools was, if I've understood it correctly, that the lack of fixed functionality (and variables) in modern OpenGL makes it difficult to create a general tool. More specific, since the general vertex attributes are arbitrary nowadays, the application does not know what to expect. The stream mapping in RenderMonkey 1.82 seems to work good for common cases (except for the TEXCOORD, which I haven't got working), and maybe there are variations of their mapping solution which could work.

I'm curious about how interesting this idea is to you. Would it be a project worth of further investigation and something to pursue? Why or why not?

Please tell me your thoughts and if you follow my link above you can vote in a poll.

[The Little Body]

100% of votes are "Yeah! Do it!"
(but ok, it's only 10 votes ...)

This can effectively to*be a good thing, so I'm OK for to work with you for to implement this on the Linux platform
(I think too that this can be a good thing to implement this for the Android platform ...)

I have discovered this link http://cumbia.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/glsldevil/ that seem me already really advanced

[Linsnos]

Great!

Thank you for your feedback. Yes I know, not so many votes yet. The number of positive votes would have to be one or a couple orders of magnitude greater than that before I believe the effort would be worth it.
I am very thankful for everyone who has voted so far!

Don't hesitate to be critical about my idea. I honestly want your opinion.

glsldevil seems like a promising software with some great features. I haven't heard about it before and hopefully it will evolve!
It seems to have a different purpose though. I'm aiming of something more like a sandbox in which you can experiment and create, as opposed to the "inspecting" and analyzing approach.

As for other platforms, it might be a good thing to do an evaluation of the possibilities. If it is simple to port, it should be ported.
I use CMake for my graphics engine project, which might make things easier.
In my view, this is a later question, since one has to have something to port first.

Anyway, I look forward to further reactions and thoughts.

[thokra]

The absence of a recent tool supporting current OpenGL mechanisms and practices has pained me for a long time now.

I also started a little shader editor for Linux and I will integrate my renderer which I'm currently developing as part of my diploma thesis. This will enable authoring shaders for a wide range of purposes with, for instance, automatic, customizable shadowmap generation, automatic gbuffer setup for deferred shading and combination of several shaders into one.

One project which has been intriguing is Lumina. It has been around for a while and can be reached at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lumina/

I can't really confirm that glslDevil is a suitable replacement for RenderMonkey as it is more closely related for instance to gDEBugger, being a GLSL debugging utility. You can edit shaders but I would hardly call it an IDE.

Anyway, I think good shader authoring tools supporting recent GLSL version will definitely be received well.

[The Little Body]

glslDevil is effectively more closely related to OpenGL debugging utility
(it display the opengl activity generated by an opengl program)
=> so effectively, it cannot to be used as a RenderMonkey inspired GLSL editor for linux

I have discovered the Lumina project with your link
=> I attempt actually to install it on my Linux Fedora box, but I have a problem with qmake ("bash: qmake: command not found") ... and always the same problem after somes commands such as 'yum install qt* qmake* --skip-broken'

[Linsnos]

You could try to install the full Qt4 SDK (i.e download the installer from Nokia). I installed it in my home directory. For a brief explanation of my solution you could check linsnos, for a post I wrote about it.
Basically, I use kalternatives to chose the right version of qmake in my system.

[Linsnos]

Nice! Thank you for the link. I installed and tried Lumina and it seems really good.
Unfortunately I get segmentation fault as soon as I try any example. It might be a configuration issue. I will look into that.
The source is from september last year. I hope they continue the development.

Your own project seems really exciting too. It would be great if you publish your results later on.
Good luck!

[The Little Body]

Hi,


I begin to work about a lightweight process that alloc shaders, detect shaders modications and delete them.

I want that it automatically detect the modication of a shader file and automatically recompile the shader in OpenGL with the new file version (because at this moment, the shader used by OpenGL is the old version).

I think that it's better if this little part can be handled by an little API, because with an API we can easily use it in a bigger project such as a "RenderMonkey like for Linux" **and** this can too to be easily used on smalls and multiples lighweights process

[The Little Body]

I can now detect files modifications in realtime using dnotify in Linux

=> I see how to integrate this with the OpenGL vertex/fragment shaders compilation chain for to can automatically apply a reload/recompilation of a shader program when one of its vertex/fragment shader or subshaders file is modified.

[Linsnos]

Yes an autobuild feature could surely be appreciated in many places. I think it is good if the user can choose if it should be on or off in an application. I learned from wikipedia that dnotify has been obsoleted by inotify. I don't know if that information is relevant for you.