RasterGrid Blog crossed the 10000 threshold
Mar 9th
I am proud to announce that the number of visits has just gone over 10000. I would like to share that I haven’t expected such a great success in less than two months. I can hardly thank this enough to all my occasional and especially for my returning visitors!
When I’ve started to write this blog my primary intension was to share my knowledge and ideas, no matter if they are legitimate enough or not. I did this in the hope that the articles on this blog may help others. At the end, it turned out that me myself learned from it a lot as, thanks to You, I’ve got great improvement ideas and feedback about my writings.
Flexible static analysis for C++ code bases
Mar 2nd
The importance of static code analysis is already a well known thing in the domain of software development. There are plenty of useful and less useful tools for the purpose, especially in the case of C++. However, even if in general the quality of these softwares is adequate they usually suffer from the inability for extending or customizing behavior. Also, a usual problem arises from the fact that the C++ language syntax is overwhelmingly complex and it makes the code parser of any static analysis tool a nightmare. In this article I would like to present a tool called CppDepend that gracefully solves the aforementioned problems primarily focusing on providing an interface that enables 100% adaptability and extensibility for creating customized metrics that are relevant or applicable in a particular domain.
Unit testing OpenGL applications
Feb 22nd
Nowadays comprehensive testing is a must for any software product. However, it isn’t such a general rule when it comes to graphics applications. Many developers face difficulties when they have to test their rendering codes. Manual tests and visual feedback is sometimes satisfactory but if one would like to have automated regression tests usual approaches seem to fail. Even if at first sight unit testing of rendering code doesn’t look really straightforward, in fact it is. OpenGL is not an exception from this rule as well. In this article I would like to briefly present a few methods how to unit test OpenGL rendering code and also present my choice and the reasons behind the decision.
Instance culling using geometry shaders
Feb 8th
OpenGL 3.2 - Nature
Since the appearance of Shader Model 4.0 people wonder how to take advantage of the newly introduced programmable pipeline stage. The most important feature enabled by geometry shaders is that one can change the amount of emitted primitives inside the pipeline. The first thing that a naive developer would try to do with it is geometry tesselation. However, the new shader performs very bad when used for tesselation in a real life scenario even though there are demos show casting this possibility. If we take a closer look at the new feature we observe that the most revolutionary in it is not that it can raise the number of emitted primitives but that it can discard them. This article would like to present a rendering technique that takes advantage of this aspect of geometry shaders to enable the GPU accelerated culling of higher order primitives.
Synchronizable objects for C++
Feb 2nd
Previously I talked about how one can easily take advantage of multiprocessing using OpenMP. Even if the C pragmas introduced by the parallel programming API standard is very straightforward for simple programs, it simply doesn’t fit nicely in a complex C++ application that is built from the ground with the OOP in mind. To smoothly introduce OpenMP into such projects one need higher level constructs that hide the actual implementation details. This is the first article of a series that will try to provide reference implementations of such an abstraction. First, we will start with synchronizable primitives that try to reflect the functionality provided by the “synchronized” statement of Java.
Site successfully migrated
Jan 28th
Almost a week ago I was talking about the problems with the server on which my blog is stored and I promised that it will be put to another server at least on Tuesday in order to not have any troubles with the reachability of the site. Unfortunately, due to environment problems this actually happened only during last night. Anyway, I am happy that the migration is over now and I hope it won’t happen again.
Flawless alternative to SDL
Jan 27th
There was always big need for libraries that provide an abstract interface towards the basic platform specific facilities that are necessary for setting up an execution environment for a particular application. In the OpenGL world one of the first such libraries was GLUT. After a while more and more functionalities were put into these libraries that reflect more or less the requirements of application developers. One such framework is SDL. It seems that SDL is still the most respected one of these and it is preferred by the developer community. However, in this topic I will present an alternative that proved its superiority to me in the last few months…
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Problems with the availability of the site
Jan 23rd
I started my blog about two weeks ago but already met some problems regarding to the availability of the site. It happened a few times that there was some problem with the Apache Server at the hosting company. This resulted in some short down times of the blog itself. I was saying that “okay, this is not that big problem” so I accepted the barely limited up-time of the server. But today something much worse happened. The server was down for hours, I don’t even know for how much time so I decided to make some action to prevent such problems in the future.
Never seen flexibility for Delphi
Jan 22nd
As far as I can tell people still prefer using python for scripting in their Delphi projects. This is probably because python scripting in Delphi has a long history and it is a proven method with easy integration. What if I would tell you that there is a free solution which enables you to write also your scripts in pascal? A few years ago I discovered an alternative that makes this possible. This highly influenced my vision about the importance of scripting. Since that I accompanied all my hobby projects with full scripting support.