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Comment by hrjet | Hacker News Reader

For someone not familiar with the Valve stack, does this work with any OpenGL application? Or is it only for those using Valve's SDK?

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This replaces the opengl dynamic library, similar to apitrace. It should work for any opengl app (the example they use is a simple gl app that draws some spheres). When the app makes an opengl call, it logs it to tmp before forwarding it on to the real opengl library. It's kind of like strace for graphics...

Then, there are tools to analyze and inspect those logs. You can presumably replay a frame, and step through each GL call and inspect the data it is sending. I haven't tried building this yet, but it looks like it includes a tool to replay the GL calls, and some kind of interactive GUI.

I have been checking the code for the generation of the spheres. I never developed C++ professionally. Is this code considered good C++ practice? I mean I saw "using namespace std", and exceptions using cout.

If it's just a simple demo app, I probably wouldn't use it as a example of good C++ practice.

Many C++ devs have a different idea on what idiomatic C++ should look like. C++11 really shakes things up as well.

There's no reason a "using namespace std;" is bad, as long as it isn't in the header. If it's in the header file, every file that includes that header will have it's namespace polluted with std declarations, and this leads to a big nasty chain of potential name conflicts (one header file includes another and so on and so forth).

Right, it makes perfect sense. Thanks for that.

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