GL Tools

Hot on the heels of yesterday's Beta, we have 1 new patch, and a couple bug fixes. Enter GLLogicOp. (Now, with a Tiger build!)

GL Logic Op allows you to modify the Logic Operation used when rendering. This is kind of like "Blend Mode" on Steroids. With this, you have 16 possible operations to choose from:

Clear, Set, Copy (Default), Copy Inverted, No Operation (lame ;), Invert, And, Not And, Or, Not Or, eXclusive Or, Equiv, And Reverse, And Inverted, Or Reverse, and Or Inverted.

This provides for some interesting pixel effects. If you make something cool-looking, please post a screenshot for all to see :)

Bug Fixes: * GL Field of View now preserves the matrix, so stuff layered higher than it won't look wonky. * GL Grid now doesn't cook the U/V coords. To enable the 'Don't Cook the Coords' mode, set the U/V inputs to a negative number. They default to -1 for newly created patches, so it should Just Work. * Some cosmetic changes for descriptions and names.

This GL Tools beta adds the Depth Buffer Alpha Threshold Patch.

This new patch causes rendering subpatches to not write to the depth buffer when writing transparent pixels below a specified threshold. This helps achieve better depth sorting with existing GL patches.

Feature suggested by @coremelt.

You may get a "halo" of pixels near the transition; there's nothing we can really do about this that I'm aware of.

This plugin is also smaller than the previous version: Apparently "Clean All" in XCode doesn't really mean "delete all intermediate build results", so some stale unused stuff was in the previous version that had accumulated due to some testing...

This update to GLTools adds in a Grid Generator and Renderer. Unlike the GLSL Grid patch, you are free to modify the vertexes on the generated grid directly.

It's a little difficult to understand at first, so I'll probably make a demo composition shortly.

This beta fixes the issue of GL Point textures requiring an alpha channel, so you can now use your iSight to make a "Me-Starfield" screen saver if you want :)

Further developing GLTools. Added a non-lame Field of View patch commissioned by coremelt. Please suggest some more features to make 0.4 useful.