GL Tools

This release of GL Tools includes several new patches and refinements of existing patches.

Current patches include:

• Kineme GL Blend Equation
• Kineme GL Clear Depth
• Kineme GL Color Mask
• Kineme GL Context Info
• Kineme GL Depth Buffer Alpha Threshold
• Kineme GL Field of View
• Kineme GL Line
• Kineme GL Line Structure
• Kineme GL Load Matrix
• Kineme GL Logic Op
• Kineme GL Matrix Mult
• Kineme GL Ortho
• Kineme GL Point
• Kineme GL Point Structure
• Kineme GL Polygon Mode
• Kineme GL Quad
• Kineme GL Quad Structure
• Kineme GL Scale
• Kineme GL Shade Model
• Kineme GL Spline
• Kineme GL Triangle
• Kineme GL Triangle Structure
• Kineme GL Viewport
• Kineme Super GLSL Grid

(New patches since GL Tools 0.4 are flagged above.)

This update to GLTools adds a few small new features.

First, the Spline patch now allows you to render points at each subdivision (not just each control point).

Second, the Polygon Mode patch now allows you to enable/disable point and line smoothing, as well as line stipple control.

Unsurprisingly, another Intel GL bug was uncovered: Enabling point-smoothing in polygon-mode mode results in no output. Yay lame intel drivers...

[ yanomano should have some really cool pictures to show for these requests... ;) ]

This beta's pretty rad. It adds a few new features, and a couple powerful patches.

The glOrtho patch now allows you to disable ortho mode (so you can switch from ortho to perspective mode without duplicating all the rendering in your composition).

But the coolest part of all is the GL Point Structure and GL Line Structure Patches. These patches allow you to render collections of points, line segments, or a continuous line strip without the overhead of an iterator.

Both patches take the same structure format: a substructure for each point, with an X, Y, and Z value. If the substructures are keyed, the keys "X", "Y", and "Z" are used, otherwise the 0th, 1st, and 2nd structure members are used to derive the coordinate. I'll probably upload some sample compositions to better demonstrate tomorrow morning.

Using JS to drive it is still slower than molasses, but it's an improvement none the less ;)

Before things get too crazy with structures, I'd like to have a plan in place to duplicate the functionality of vvvv's spreads (these are how this sort of stuff should be solved, not by more structure hacks....)

This GLTools beta introduces the glOrtho patch.

Iterators are the worst way to make sphere-grids :) Half of them are inexplicably missing too for the screenshot. Probably due to system load or something. But you get the idea.

This beta addresses a few loading issues that have been reported.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, QC compositions using GL patches exhibit strange behaviour when loading (usually, by just drawing the checkerboard, with an "init failed" message in the console). Spline value loading also got some error checking (there was a report of incorrect values for unattached inputs sometimes.. I've not been able to duplicate it, but this may correct it?)

Polygon Mode also go properly branded (it was missing "Kineme" in the title, so it looked like a built-in patch)

No real big functional changes.