Archives 2009

I'm beginning to think that the "code walkthrough" style is just way too involved for many of these tutorials/demos.  Most of them can be reduced to "define scenegraph", maybe set up a few event handlers to manipulate it.  I think I'll go back to the low-level tutorials when I get a chance to work on ...

Spent the whole day on OpenGLContext.  I bashed out a "molehill" tutorial based on the classic from Mark Kilgard), mostly to verify that the NURBS stuff really isn't broken[1], and did a bit of work creating a "gear" geometry type (not satisfied with that one at all, very dull looking).  I made the ROUTE mechanism ...

Sometimes you get discouraged about a project that you work on all the time.  You think "no one uses it, so I may as well just do whatever I feel like doing".  Over the years, you lose track of the idea of releasing it as a working piece of software, you just sort of think ...

Second alpha of the 3.0.1 series includes a number of bug-fixes from PyOpenGL 3.0.1a1, as well as updated extensions (including OpenGL 3.1 core).  The new extensions are currently just auto-generated, so if you see something that needs special wrapping, feel free to ping me.  The OpenGL.org extension header now breaks out the deprecated/non-deprecated functionality, so ...

Spent the day at Science 2.0 down at the Mars Centre.  Kinda freaky how many people I am getting to know at these things.  Greg is, as was mentioned, definitely a node in the connectivity graph.  The *P marketing department did a presentation, I've never personally looked into the system, but the few quick snippets ...

Doing a bit more on the shader tutorial stuff.  Up now is the first crack of the diffuse+ambient (with directional light) introduction.  Very much a fast bash-out, but whatever :) .

Decided to get at least *some* PyOpenGL stuff done this weekend, so played around a little with the texture-atlas-based text rendering stuff.  I went with a spike test rather than trying to refactor the whole font engine in OpenGLContext at the first go.

I spent the longest time figuring out why the texture always came ...

Selenium rocks.  Unfortunately, every time I sit down at a new client I wind up having to do boilerplate setup to get a nose-testable Selenium environment.  By nose-testable I mean something that automatically sets up and closes down the selenium server (and the client servers under test, though that's a separate issue).

To be useful ...

I'm always wary of adding non-standard functionality to PyOpenGL, but as I've been trying to write tutorials for how to use shaders I'm finding that it really is necessary to have a module that provides the appropriate "alternate" definitions and provides the basic compileShader/compileProgram functions (with error checking and log extraction).

So, to use a ...

Finally broke down and installed Visual Studio Express 2008 on my Vista partition of the work laptop.  It takes a GB on disk, bah.  Anyway, it worked as advertised, so whatever, I now have a Python 2.6+ compatible compiler and can use Mingw32 for Python 2.5, so no more need for the Toolkit stuff.

Interesting ...