GL Tools

Possibly addressed some config errors with GL Spline. Added Spline Stippling (yes!), added Line Texturing.

Let me know if splines start acting strangely; they've had a lot of internal changes take place.

There's an annoying behaviour with spline stippling where Input Stipple patterns that have no neighboring 1's are effectively disabled (0x5555, powers of two, other patterns). Setting scale to anything greater than 1 corrects this. This is expected behaviour, but if it's annoying let me know and I'll try to fix it (probably by forcing scale to have 1 silently added to it, so it'll always be > 1)

This GL Tools beta adds support for line stippling (no line texturing yet), and adds a new patch, Read Pixels.

Read Pixels reads the QC Viewer's output when it's evaluated, and outputs what the viewer would display. This means it won't read from higher layers if it's attached to a low-layer consumer.

Currently it's pretty limited: It reads the whole frame, and only the Color data. In upcoming betas I'll include inputs to control where it reads from (x, y, width, height), and I'll probably add Depth-Buffer reading too.

This version of GL Tools contains several enhancements over version 0.3. There are both Leopard and Tiger Versions available.

• GL Logic Op Patch
• Faster GL Spline
• A Field of View patch (not the built-in one)
• Depth Buffer Alpha Threshold
• GL Points can now be attenuated by distance

GL Logic Op allows you to control which logic operation is used when drawing pixels to the frame buffer.

Depth Buffer Alpha Threshold allows you to disable writes to the depth buffer for transparent pixels. This helps when you have depth checking enabled and images with transparency.

GL Point attenuation doesn't work on Intel GMA950 Video cards (found in MacBooks and MacMinis). This is a driver bug; please file a bug report with Apple, not us :)

There was one report of invalid patch names for the Tiger build, but we've been unable to reproduce this after testing on several machines. If you experience this, please let us know; we're interested in solving this.

Thanks to all the beta testers for their testing, feedback, suggestions, and patience while 0.4 was in development. :) Between the last beta and this production release, the only change was some interface text (consistent category names across tiger and leopard now), as well as a small fix to the Field of View patch to multiply against the previous matrix instead of simply overwriting it. This will hopefully ease some FOV + Matrix patch combination issues.

Some minor changes to the GLTools beta, with a Tiger version too.

This version adds control over spline control point size and color, as well as a few cleanups and performance tweaks in preparation for the Production release this Wednesday.

The Grid Generator and renderer probably will not be in the production release, unless you think they should be included. Let me know what you think.

Some updates to the GLTools patch, in preparation for another public release.

This release fixes point smoothing on Intel GMA950 video cards (was broken a few betas ago), and adds a new feature to GL Points: Distance attenuation! This feature doesn't work on Intel GMA950 cards (if this bothers you, file a bug report at http://bugreporter.apple.com/).

GL Splines were also optimized to be about 10-30% faster.

Target release date is January 9th, 2008, so please file any bugs or issues before then so we can address them.

A Tiger build should be available within 48 hours.