Open sourcing GasLight?

I’ve been considering open sourcing GasLight. For one thing, I’m having some hardware compatibility problems (stupid text fragment shaders) that I’m finding impossible to fix without any appropriate hardware to test it on, and I’m hoping the OS community might be able to help with that. I only have my Powerbook to test things on, which really isn’t a good way to gauge compatibility and speed on other machines.

Here’s some things I know could do with some work

  • Dual screen support. I’m starting to think this might be possible again, but I haven’t had chance to properly look at it.
  • ATI_text_fragment_shader. The code’s there, but it doesn’t do anything. If this worked we could have shaders on the 8500 upward…
  • Performance on some of the Geforce cards is shockingly bad.
  • We could, in theory, replace PBuffers with something that works in Jaguar
  • There’s optimizations to be made all over the place. Some pretty big arrays get processed when looking at the waveform data, for one thing. And the render-to-texture stuff is hardly snappy.

I don’t know if people will actually contribute, or whether they’d just gut everything and run off to do their own thing. If you know much about any of the above, and would be willing try your hand at improving GasLight, let me know. You can either leave a comment, or find me on AIM as catthish.

· 2004-11-16 ·

  1. I might be of some help w/ this :)

    I’ve got several GPUs at my disposal (NV40, RV250M, R350 etc.) and several systems to work with if needed (PM G5 and PB G4)

    I’ve done a fair amount of work w/ ATI_text_fragment_shader before (all for video processing applications) so I’d be of some use here.

    Offscreen rendering on 10.2.x could be accomplished using either aglSurfaceTexture() or glCopyTexSubImage2D() to an offscreen window. It’s somewhat of a PITA but I would think that this would work.

    Oh yeah, I’m very good at optimizing code (Shark and OpenGL Profiler are the shit for this) :) — feelgood    Dec 31, 02:55 PM    #
  2. Hi Jonathan,

    open source example code, called “VizKit”, is available online at: http://www.imagomat.de/vizkit.

    It’s a general purpose visual Plug-In for iTunes, I developed as a replacement for Apple’s QuickDraw based SDK. Cross-platform, OpenGL based, with texturing of the cover art data and some diagnostical tools.

    It’s certainly not perfect – but maybe worth a look.

    Cheers,

    Heiko Wichmann — Heiko Wichmann    Jan 4, 08:27 AM    #

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