Posts tagged C++
Instance Cloud Reduction reloaded
Jun 30th
OpenGL 3.3 - Nature
A few months ago I’ve presented an object culling mechanism that I’ve named Instance Cloud Reduction (ICR) in the article Instance culling using geometry shaders. The technique targets the first generation of OpenGL 3 capable cards and takes advantage of geometry shaders’ capability to reduce the emitted geometry amount in order to get to a fully GPU accelerated algorithm that performs view frustum culling on instanced geometry without the need of OpenCL or any other GPU compute API. After the culling step the reduced set of instance data is fed to the drawing pass in the form of a texture buffers. In this article I will present an improved version of the algorithm that exploits the use of instanced arrays introduced lately in OpenGL 3.3 to further optimize it.
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.
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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Exploit parallelism with the least effort
Jan 19th
Multiprocessing has been there for decades as a premium feature for enterprise applications but adopting this technology still brings huge burden to software companies that still maintain and develop legacy code. Nowadays, as most commodity hardware already have highly parallelized architectures, a modern application is almost unimaginable without proper multi-threading capabilities even if we talk about text editor or a multimedia application. The transition from traditional software development to multiprocessing is not an easy and painless task. Fortunately we have such tools in our hand like OpenMP.
Unit testing in C++
Jan 11th
Many people are looking for information about which particular C++ unit testing framework they should use for their project and there are also many articles discuss the topic but few articles talk about mock frameworks which are even more important factor when applying unit testing in practice and they have much greater effect on the productivity when doing test-driven development.
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Manage code yourself
Jan 11th
Those who know me know it well that I am not a big fan of languages which produce managed code. In this article I would like to cover the reasons behind my skepticism. Also I would like to dispel the myths around such languages and try to prove them with facts (we will see how well I manage to achieve this). If you disagree with me, you’ll most probably hate me because of making this post but please, respect my personal point of view.