gDEBugger

Just had a nice lunch time playing with gDEBugger, a free OpenGL analysis tool by Graphic Remedy. I only managed to scrap the surface of what it can do but straight away it helped me identify a pretty horrible bug and also speed up my code quite a bit.

Particularly handy was being able to see the values uniforms have been set to for the active shader. My lighting has been looking more than a bit flat since I put it in a couple of weeks ago. When I paused my game I could see that the light direction vector hadn’t been normalised despite being sure that my code was definitely doing that.

A quick look in the vector class found a routine that copied a Vec3 to a float[3] to be copying the Y element into the Z spot. Ooops! Looks a lot nicer now it’s fixed.

I also speed up my feedback code quite a bit by rationalising the buffers I was using to construct the final frame. V useful.

Gazotron (the highly original home project I’m working on ) looks a lot nice for both of those changes:

I like the feedback on the floor. Next up I need to change it so the feedback is mirroring what’s happening on the level. Right now it’s using objects from the game screen to feed it. I’m hoping it’ll look pretty good when you’ve feedback effects tracking the player, grunts, bullets etc