Valve Working on GNU/Linux Native Open Source OpenGL Debugger

jones_supa writes "OpenGL debugging has always lagged behind DirectX, mainly because of the excellent DX graphics debugging tools shipping with Visual Studio and GL being left with APITrace. Valve's Linux initiatives are making game companies to think about OpenGL, and the video game company wants to create a good open source OpenGL debugger to improve the ecosystem. AMD and Nvidia have already expressed interest in helping them out. Valve has been developing VOGL mostly on Ubuntu-based distributions under Qt Creator. The software currently supports tracing OpenGL 1.0 through 3.3 (core and compatibility), and is expected to eventually support OpenGL 4.x. Many more details on VOGL can be found at Valve's Rich Geldreich's blog." This looks much nicer than BuGLe. Valve is using Mercurial for version control and they plan to throw it up on bitbucket under an unspecified open source license soon. It works with clang and gcc, but debugging with gcc is currently very slow (hopefully something that can be fixed once the source is available and the gcc hackers can see what's going on). The tracer's internal binary log format can be converted into JSON for use with other tools as well.

Comments

Re:Open Source! At least it isnt DRM laden like St

[Ardyvee]

Once people get it right that steamworks is the part that is DRM and steam is a distribution service and a store... I mean. There are some games that have no DRM at all and after you download them you can use them for whatever. But nooo, a distribution service requiring you to log in is DRM (never mind that GOG also requires you to log in for first download, and they get praised as DRM-free). /rant

Inertia

[Dega704]

Reasons like this are why Vavle's push is good for the entire Linux community and not just gamers. I see a lot of naysaying about SteamOS, but what really speaks to me is the number of gears that are beginning to turn.