#realityaugmenter

Strewth, just when I thought everything was good, the reliability testing turns up a major problem with my new thread safe views, they would flicker and lose their textures for some unknown reason.  Been working on it all week with very little progress, then thought of a slightly different approach and fixed it in an hour.  TBH it didn’t occur to me sooner as it involved an old workaround code for the old way I dealt with threading, with my new model I could simplify it without hitting earlier threading issues.

Also combined with another issue with shaders I hadn’t anticipated, apparently uniforms are set per shader, not per context, and as I’m using threading and multiple shared contexts, I was getting baffling glitches, luckily I found this old post and all was good : https://www.khronos.org/message_boards/showthread.php/6172-Uniforms-on-a-shader-program-used-in-multiple-threads . I could just create a seperate shader for drawing to views on the main thread.

Phew, all working again from what I can tell.  My OpenGL is now core 3.2 compliant. all fixed function pipeline stuff eradicated (except for legacy QC Support).

I’ve also fixed the threading problems affecting the preview views, so no more random crashes on adding and removing chop areas, it should be more stable generally too, but uses a little more GPU memory.  However all extra GPU memory is cleaned up when not required, so if using the Outputs view, the app runs as efficiently as possible, only consuming resources required for the final output.

Hit some snags and unexpected behaviour along the way and it took a little longer than expected. Finally deciding to rewrite the preview views took me more time than I wanted and was quite frustrating at times, but the app is in a better state overall.

Unit tests all passing as before so just need to run some reliability tests and make sure everything is as before, a release should be coming in the next couple of days.

Just about finished moving to OpenGL Core profile.  It gave me some problems for a few weeks but it all just came together the last couple of days. 

This means I’ve managed to simplify my ios/osx code sharing and eliminate some troublesome aspects between the two OS’s.  The code is simpler and more versatile.

One of the best aspects was being able to eliminate the cgl_ctx variable required by CGLMacro in legacy contexts, as GL3 commands work directly in the current context without the variable.  This makes the openGL code much more portable in my app.

Finally, I got a new version:

http://www.seriouscyrus.com/reality_augmenter/files/RealityAugmenter090Beta.zip

As i near to the first release, it's time to have a look at my stats again.

When I'm productive: seems Tuesdays are best for me, and I'm a bit of a night owl, working mostly in the afternoons to the early hours:

Commits per month : I suffered at the start of this year, I had a bug that had me tied up for a month or two, I also signed up for unemployment benefit, and dealing with the RAV sucked up my time, energy and motivation, but I've got back into the swing of things the last couple of months as I got used to their bureaucracy:

Current project size is 62,900 lines of code, it's been growing a lot recently as I added a bunch of features, auto-update, embedded store (not yet visible in beta, but it's there), syphon support and a video player (in next release) among other things: