Author archives: Mike

I'm guessing that everyone who's ever taken "intro to not particularly slow computer graphics" has written their own texture atlas implementation, so hey, I should too :) .  Texture atlases are collections of large numbers of small textures which are packed into a single, larger texture with some book-keeping metadata to allow the GL to ...

Began working on more flags to peel back some of the ease-of-use layers in PyOpenGL to recoup performance.  List/tuple array-types now respect the ERROR_ON_COPY flag (effectively disabling list/tuple support when the flag is activated) and there is a STORE_POINTERS flag, which when False (with ERROR_ON_COPY True) will disable wrapper operations storePointer mechanism.  That's one stage ...

Videos of my two talks at PyCon are both up now.  Introduction to Python Profiling is probably the better of the two for the general programming audience.  A Whole new OpenGL is only going to be of interest to people who actually want to work with OpenGL (in Python) or are just curious about how ...

PyOpenGL is the traditional OpenGL binding for the Python language (Python 2.x series).  This release is the first major release of the package in more than 4 years.  PyOpenGL 3.x is a complete rewrite of the PyOpenGL project which attempts to retain compatibility with the original PyOpenGL 2.x API while providing support for many more ...

As of this evening SimpleParse bzr trunk seems to be working on Python 2.6.  Weird thing is that I seem to have done the bulk of the work back in November... but I don't recall doing it.  All I did this evening was fix a couple of deprecation warnings and a problem with conflicts on ...

PyOpenGL 3.0.0 is almost out the door.  Testing is done on Linux 64-bit and all seems well.  Documentation is updated (including deprecation warnings and updated PyDoc version).  Install of the library worked on a MacBook this afternoon, but the PyOpenGL-Demo module refused to download (some SourceForge issue with a redirect). Will have to try again ...

I've just released version 2.0.0b4 of the RunSnakeRun profile-viewer module I mentioned in my PyCon presentation on profiling.  This version runs reasonably well on Win32 platforms (as well as Linux, of course) and has tooltips for the SquareMap and text where there's sufficient room to display it.

Saw strange performance show up during testing of a simple set of shader-based samples in OpenGLContext.  Discovered what seemed to be a memory leak of the wrapper objects in OpenGL_accelerate... investigation showed that the wrapers were re-"compiling" the finalized versions of the functions on every call.  Turns out that setting self.__class__.__call__ doesn't alter future calls ...

Decided to work on the workstation today (bigger screen, tablet for drawing)... ran the little mandelbrot explorer demo.  Managed to lock up the whole machine at just a few hundred iterations.  Apparently having compiz on while doing "test the limits of your graphics card" code running is... counter-indicated.

Kinda neat zooming into the mandelbrot until ...

The Orange Book (OpenGL Shading Language 2nd Ed) has a neat little shader demo where you render the Mandelbrot set with a fragment shader.  It's one of those "cool, but not particularly practical" examples of shader's power.

I've been adding some rudimentary "generic" shader support to OpenGLContext, so I decided I'd use that little bit ...