GL3 Package Public Beta

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!