The Industry's Foundation for High Performance Graphics

Hello,

I've been looking for a good tool/IDE for authoring GLSL shaders (preferably
with an ability to debug them) and at this point my search came to a halt -
as it seems that there are tools available but none of them actually has
all the features I want and sometimes those tools are simply unstable to
the point of being completely unusable.

So I wanted to share my findings with OpenGL community and let me know/correct
me if I'm missing anything.

(I have to admit that my interest was partially sparked by this article:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX)

I'm being a hobbyist OpenGL developer for a few years now, have a big faith in
OpenGL and it is just discouraging sometimes when you realize that the only way
to figure out what is wrong with your shader is to use printf-style debugging
while knowing that the other camp (DX) has very powerfull and stable tools,
like PIX for example.

Ideally I would like to have a tool/shader authoring IDE that would allow me to
do the following:
1) Syntax highlighting + intellisense (language version sensitive);
2) Tooltips for function parameters (like in Visual Studio) + context sensitive help;
3) Debugger with autos/locals/watch-window/breakpoints/run-to-cursor support,
pixel-debugging features, etc.

The tools I looked at are these ones:
1) glslDevil: I had high hopes for it. Looks very nice on screenshots and even provides
hardware-aware debugging. But! - most of the time it just crashes on me
(I'm on Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit running 2xGF280 SLI);
I need to turn off OpenGL function call trace to get faster to the next shader switch -
otherwise it takes very long - 15-20 minutes or it just freezes. Every time
(95% of all attempts) when a click the Pause button (in the GL Trace window) it crashes.
Another problem: I could never fully debug vertex shaders - I could not get
the values of the variables displayed.
When (while debugging a vertex shader) I click the 'add to active window' button (Watch window)
it crashes always.
Thus: hardly usable at all (and I checked - there are no detectable GL errors).
2) NVIDIA's FX Composer (2.5):
From the overview video seems to be a very nice tool - and just what I need - but!
no GLSL support - and it does not seem to be provided any time soon.
From what I found on forums - adding GLSL support is quite hard as structure
of GLSL program is quite different from Cg/HLSL - no techniques/pass/includes support...
3) Render Monkey (1.82);
The best tool so far (and I'm using it) - but no debugging support.
4) Shadesmith:
No GLSL support; requires source code modification; fragment shaders only.
No updates since 2003.
5) NShader:
*) only provides syntax highlighiting;
*) only supports VS 2008 (I have VS 2005 a see few reasons to
upgrade to 2008 as I'm mostly doing C++)
6) Typhoon Labs Shader Designer:
*) Crashes on Windows Vista/7. Could get it to work though on Windows XP.
*) Supports intellicense and syntax highlighting;
*) Does not support shader debugging;
*) No longer updated as the development has been ceased - thus does not
support latest version of the language.

So is this the state of affairs in OpenGL land?

Thanks for your feedback.

P.S. I guess I should just send bug reports to the glslDevil team hoping that they would
fix them in less than a year...

To debug shaders, I just render to 4 MRT RGBA32f targets, outputting whatever var interests me, and showing the 16 float values on a pixel under the mouse.
I name the glsl shader files as .c and include them in the VisualStudio project (skip build), there with definitions of vec3,vec4, etc I get full intellisense.
Breakpoints and such can be easily improvized with the MRT method. Otherwise, you may have to wait for months or years for complete 3.2 tools

see NVIDIA Nexus

In visual studio 2005/2008:
tools->options->text editor->file extension

Add your shader file's extension with Editor "Microsoft Visual C++", add keywords to usertype.dat if you couldn't use NShader. Then you can edit shader in vc.

To debug, do like Ilian Dinev.

You are joking right? This might be a sensible option if you are an indie developer or doing hobby programming, but not when time is money.

NVidia has great tools for doing Shader development, and debugging with full access to the graphics card information, but they are not caring at all about GLSL.

NVidia only cares about giving just enough support to keep people happy to use OpenGL with their cards, I would say.

FXComposer is not having GLSL support and from the forum discussions it will never get, most likely.

Nexus is a Visual Studio extension to work with Cuda, DirectX Compute and it will have basic OpenCL support. No debugging support besides tracing, is planned for OpenCL or OpenGL, at least on version 1.0.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/GTC/documents/1023_GTC09.pdf (page 21)


As for ATI, they seem to provide better OpenGL support on their free tools, although they are famous for having driver issues. And I am not sure how good their tools work with non-ATI cards.

It is a shame that the two major graphic vendors are not giving proper support to OpenGL, but I guess they are not seeing any profit in doing so.

Maybe the increase on the mobile platforms that make use of OpenGL ES, will help change this.

Just a small addition to my previous comment, if you have a good PC, and don't have any issues with Java based tools, the NetBeans OpenGL plugin might also be an option to edit GLSL.

http://kenai.com/projects/netbeans-opengl-pack/pages/Home

It is more oriented to do Java+OpenGL development, but it is also an option.

Thank you pjmpl for the great post and for saving me time for typing!

I will definitely take a look at this plug-in as it seems very nice (judging by screenshots) - at least better than anything I mentioned so far.

But I guess this IDE does not support GLSL debugging either, am I correct?

Have you read the original topic?
Look at the tool #1.