Friday, January 18, 2008

gDEbugger for OpenGL ES

So I decided to test the gDEbugger from graphicREMEDY for OpenGL ES. I got an error message indicating a second hand exception and there was not much I can do about it. I posted my problem in their online forum, but did not get any response so far.
I guess with the decreasing market of OpenGL there is not much money in providing a debugger for this API. In games, less companies do PC games anymore and OpenGL is not used by any AAA title anymore on the main PC platform Windows.
I was hoping that they target the upcoming OpenGL ES market, but this might be still in its infanty. If anyone knows a tool to debug OpenGL ES similar to PIX or GcmReplay, I would appreciate a hint. To debug I would work on the PC platform ... in other words I have a PC and an iPhone version of the game :-)
Update January 19th: graphicRemedy actually came back to me and asked me to send in source code ... very nice.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

San Angeles Observation on the iPhone

I ported the San Angeles Observation demo from Jetro Lauha to the iPhone (www.oolongengine.com). You can find the original version here

http://iki.fi/jetro/

This demo throws about 60k polys onto the iPhone and runs quite slow :-(. I will double check with Apple that this is not due to a lame OpenGL ES implementation on the phone.
I am thinking about porting other stuff now over to the phone or working on getting a more mature feature set for the engine ... porting is nearly more fun, because you can show a result afterwards :-) ... let's see.