New OpenGL adapter on Windows

In WaveEngine 2.3.1 we have added a new adapter on Windows for OpenGL, this allows WaveEngine developers to run their games using DirectX and OpenGL on Windows. This will be really handy to adapt their assets (like shaders or textures) faster to our OpenGL platforms (Linux, MacOS, iOS and Android).

As you know, in WaveEngine you have to provide the HLSL and GLSL version of each material, allowing you to apply custom optimizations to them. But until now Windows developers needed to run their games on other platforms to test their GLSL shaders. This new adapter is here to help them with this task and be able to compare the final render result with DirectX and OpenGL at the same time.

This also opens new possibilities to the future versions of WaveEngine, because now it is possible to create new tools or render modes of the editor using both low level APIs on Windows.

To simplify the changes needed to run a legacy game on Windows using OpenGL we have created a new dll called WaveEngine.WinGLAdapter, so by changing the WaveEngine.Adapter reference to this, it will get your game running using OpenGL instead of DirectX.

By the way, we recommend that you use the Wave editor profile configuration to create a new Windows profile and select OpenGL. This will generate two different solutions on your project to make it easy to compile and debug your project on both APIs.

As you can see in the image above, first you need to select the platform, then set a new profile name and finally select the launcher type as OpenGL.

It is also possible to make a performance comparison of your development between DirectX and OpenGL to find differences and fix it.

The new OpenGL adapter can be debugger using RenderDoc This amazing tool lets you make a low-level debug of the final image render by WaveEngine, similar to PIX or the Graphics debugger in the latest version of Visual Studio.

This is very interesting when you need to improve the performance of your games or when you need to find shader errors.

You can find more information of this tool at: https://renderdoc.org/

Published by

@jcant0n

Javier is a Computer Science Engineer who has always had a passion for 3D graphics and software architecture. He enjoys imparting talks about technology and has contributed in many important software and video game events. He has participated in multitude of software projects involving multitouch technologies, innovative user interfaces, augmented reality, and video games. His professional achievements include being MVP for Windows DirectX and DirectX XNA for the last eight years, Xbox Ambassador, as well as Microsoft Student Partner and Microsoft Most Valuable Student during his years at college. Currently he works at Plainconcepts and he is the development team lead at WaveEngine project.

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