GL3 Package Public Beta
Rob Ramirez
Aug 22 2019 | 7:01 pm
Hey everyone!
We are truly excited today to announce the public beta release of our GL3 package. GL3 expands on the existing generative power of Jitter’s original graphics engine by providing support for the more modern OpenGL Core Profile and recent versions of GLSL. This brings some exciting new features along with some new challenges.
To get started:
- Install the GL3 package from the Package Manager (File->Show Package Manager).
- When installation is complete, restart Max.
- Open the Max Preferences window (Max->Preference) and scroll to the Jitter category. Change OpenGL Engine to ‘gl3’.
- Restart Max to use the new OpenGL Engine.
- You can verify that you are running GL3 by creating a jit.world object. When you turn rendering on for that object, you should see the message "gl3 engine loaded" in the Max Window.
To switch back to the old gl2 engine, simply change the OpenGL Engine preference back to ‘gl2’, and restart. The restart is unnecessary if Jitter has yet to initialize. The Max Console will post a warning if restart is required after changing the preference. If you wish to uninstall the package, make sure you switch the preference back to gl2 before uninstalling.
New features of GL3 include:
- Modern GLSL language support
- GPU instancing with jit.gl.multiple and jit.gl.mesh
- 2D texture input directly to a jit.gl.cubemap face or 3D texture slice
- Transform Feedback of vertex data via the new jit.gl.buffer and jit.gl.tf objects. This feature allows you to preserve vertex or geometry shader output for future use as geometry data on the graphics card, opening the door to some highly efficient particle simulations and new creative possibilities that we haven’t thought of yet. Be sure to check the examples.
The launcher located under the Extras menu showcases all of these new features. Some of the example patches make use of the jit.mo package which you can install via the Package Manager. The launcher also includes a link to the documentation, which I highly encourage you to check out.
Please note, unlike the gl2 engine which worked well on most any graphics card from the past decade, some of the features in the gl3 engine will require a more recent Nvidia or AMD card. Don’t be surprised if you aren’t getting stellar performance running this on an integrated Intel graphics card, or any card older than 5 years or so.
Finally, this is a beta release. Our team has put together a fantastic package, but documentation and feature set are still a work in progress and your feedback is invaluable. Please post any questions or comments directly to the Jitter forum, and for any bug reports please include your graphics card name and OS version.
Happy patching!
GL3 package for Jitter | Cycling '74
- Herr MarkantAug 22 2019 | 11:32 pmIs this downward compatible? If i enable gl3 some of my patches stop working properly, is this a bug i should report?
- Cory MetcalfAug 22 2019 | 11:41 pm@HERR MARKANT - not all gl2 features are fully supported. If you take a look in the Max documentation, there's a topic called "Current Limitations of the GL3 Engine" that outlines the limitations. If you are using shaders loaded in jit.gl.shader or jit.gl.slab, you'll need to update those as described in the "Updating GLSL Shaders for GL3" guide, also in the built in documentation.If you run into issues that you think fall outside of those topics, please do submit a report to support@cycling74.com.
- Herr MarkantAug 22 2019 | 11:50 pmAh ok, thanks for clarification. I have some issues with gl.mesh (shapes not showing up) but I'll deep dive into this the next days and I'll report.. Thanks for all your hard work.
- Cha BlascoAug 23 2019 | 9:06 amHi! This is an amazing update! I followed all step above but I have some issues, see screenshot below. Any suggestions how to fix it? Thanks!
- daddymaxAug 23 2019 | 1:26 pmYou guys are great - thanks for always getting us new features - this one is intriguing.
- Rob RamirezAug 23 2019 | 3:32 pmhi cha blasco, can you please send along your OS and GPU info? are you able to run any of the other examples?
- Peter RedecoppAug 23 2019 | 5:25 pmThis is great! Congrats to Rob and the C74 team, I look forward to trying the GL3 package out!
- hobbes73Aug 24 2019 | 1:48 pmAwesome work! But i found out that if you set Max8 to gl3 instead of gl2 that max for live devices in Ableton (10) won't show any graphics or would crash (midivolve).
- Cha BlascoAug 26 2019 | 12:44 pmHi Rob Ramirez! The same issue in all examples. macOS Sierra 10.12.6 ATI Radeon HD 4670 GPU PCIe x16 VRAM256MB
- Rob RamirezAug 26 2019 | 7:30 pmok, now we're getting somewhere. so your card is from 2008 and only supports up to opengl 3.3. This indicates that we are not correctly falling back to a supported gl context when the creation fails.Unfortunately even my old mac-mini from 2012 running OS 10.11 supports up to 4.1 (the maximum GL version on any Mac) so I can't test this out. However it should be an easy enough thing to fix, and I will take a look. thanks for following up.
- Rob RamirezAug 26 2019 | 7:41 pmHi HOBBES73, thanks for your report. The gl3 package requires Max 8.0.8 to run and the version bundled with Live does not support this. You will have to adjust your Live preference to point to Max 8.0.8 to test gl3 with Live. Hope that helps.
- cobtobAug 27 2019 | 12:39 pmawsome upgrade! thanks a lot!I believe I found a bug with jit.gl.sketch: cmd_enable message doesn´t work with gl3 on my machine (MBP2015, MacOS 10.14.6, GeForce 750M)
- Rob RamirezAug 27 2019 | 3:15 pmif your problem is the same as cha blasco as you claim, then i addressed this above. but i have no way of knowing if it's the same since you haven't given me any info.
- inaneAug 27 2019 | 3:19 pmLaptop specifications are: Mac book pro 13" 2.4GHz (2011) Intel HD Graphics 3000 with 384MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory Same logs in the max console window.
- Rob RamirezAug 27 2019 | 3:25 pmcool thanks for following up. so yes it's the same issue with GL support in your card. Unfortunately your card has even lower support (3.1) and therefore will not be able to run the gl3 engine (requires GL 3.2 and greater). I will address catching these cases and falling back more gracefully (in your case falling back to the gl2 engine) in the next update to the gl3 package. But again, your card will not support the gl3 engine.
- Rob RamirezAug 27 2019 | 3:43 pmHey everyone thanks much for the kind words, excitement, and feedback so far!Due to the scope and complexity of this project, I'm going to lock this thread and ask that you make new posts in the Jitter forum, and include "gl3" in the post title.Thanks much for the continued involvement!
