FFGL development guide?

[gpvillamil]

Is there any good guide on developing FFGL plugins? I'm looking for some kind of step-by-step tutorial.

I notice that a lot of the plugins in the FFGL SDK are basically loading a GLSL shader and executing - I wonder if there is some way of making a "generic" plugin that would allow pasting in existing GLSL shaders while running.

That might open up a lot of possibilities, such as developing shaders in RenderMonkey (or similar) and then pasting them into such a "shader host" plugin.

[levon]

i think it should be possible, the latest version of Blender 3d has GLSL shaders programmed in python. however i dont know how well it would run changing GLSL shaders on the fly could cause crashes.

It might be better to have them load at start up for stability.

ild love for some pointers on making some FFGL Plugins as well.

[ilah]

well it looks like theres abit of action over at the sourceforge.net FFGL forum. i reckon if we hassle 'em all out a little someone might post some pointers up...

[bart]

I notice that a lot of the plugins in the FFGL SDK are basically loading a GLSL shader and executing - I wonder if there is some way of making a "generic" plugin that would allow pasting in existing GLSL shaders while running.

Yes this is definitely possible, we do not have time to build this now so we're hoping someone else will. But there is no easy way to do it if you do not have any experience in programming openGL. You can download the FFGL SDK from www.freeframe.org

[ilah]

hello all
so failing finding a specific guide to FFGL plug dev, are there any programming fields that are very similar?
like if i followed an introduction to general opengl programming, or some form of C++, would this help?
right now im kinda stuck at the bit where msofts visual studio is failing to compile due to missing instances.. so yeh..

[gpvillamil]

Well, I've gone through a bunch of the FFGL examples, and what I've found is that they often load a GLSL shader (usually stored as a series of strings), and then have some logic in C++.

So I would imagine a good first step is to learn a bit about GLSL (http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/glsl/).

You can probably get quite far by just changing the shader and seeing what happens.

I also am having problems compiling the examples. I am using MSVC++ and building the various example projects gives up lots of warnings, and I can't find the compiled DLL.

[ilah]

cheers gpvillamil.
ill look into this GLSL shennanigans.
that problem with the example projects under MSVC++ is exactly where i was at. some work and some produce heaps of errors yeh?
my programmer friend doesn't have too much experience with C++, but he was thinking i should look into beginners tutorials on opengl games programming...
what do ppl think? is this a good/bad way to go? remembering that im a complete nub...

[gavspav]

What the op said!

A generic Freeframe Plugin that can load user generated GLSL shaders.

Looked into doing it myself but way out of my depth and it would take me months

Anyone want to do this pretty please? Surely it would cause a massive growth in 1.5 Plugins overnight.

[syzygy]

Since there is interest in this, I'll have a look at sorting something out.

There are a few issues with a plugin that just loads a shader:

* Where should the shaders be saved?
* Parameters would have to be generically named (e.g. Parameter1, Parameter2, Parameter3 etc)
* Each freeframe dll can only provide one plugin, so multiple shaders would have to be selected between using a parameter
* There are all kinds of graphics card compatibility issues with shaders (e.g. some cards can't handle some instructions, some cards have different limits on number of instructions)


It would be much nicer to have a system that takes a shader and bakes it into a complete plugin with nice parameter names and so on, but that would be a fair bit more work.

A simple shader-loading plugin would work nicely for prototyping shader-based plugins though. Good ones that got made by the community could then be made into full plugins quite easily.

Dan.

[gavspav]

There are a few issues with a plugin that just loads a shader:

* Where should the shaders be saved?
In the same folder as the plugin?
* Parameters would have to be generically named (e.g. Parameter1, Parameter2, Parameter3 etc)
Thats what Trey said.
* Each freeframe dll can only provide one plugin, so multiple shaders would have to be selected between using a parameter
Don't understand.
* There are all kinds of graphics card compatibility issues with shaders (e.g. some cards can't handle some instructions, some cards have different limits on number of instructions)
Oh.

Just seems like this feature might spur a rush of interest/creativity on the free frame front. Make it more accessible to non-hardcore programmers?