Archives week 29 of 2009

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 ...

I've just managed to get PyOpenGL's first alpha for the 3.0.1 series out the door.  The biggest changes of note are:

• Shader convenience module OpenGL.GL.shaders, provides shader entry points named as the core entry points with alternate implementations using ARB when necessary.  Includes Two utility functions compileShader( source, type_constant ) and compileProgram( *shaders ) which ...

On the principle that it's better to just bash through and get *something* done than to spend forever trying to get enough time to do it right, I've started quickly converting the existing shader sample code into automatically generated tutorial web-pages.  I'm using a quick and dirty script to turn the '''-quoted strings in ...