Open Source Debuggers and Integration with a 3D Engine

Abstract

Debugging is always an important phase in an application life. Applications using 3D hardware accelerated graphics in general, and OpenGL in particular, are usually hard to debug since the computation is split between two processors, each with its own memory space. To be able to debug these applications one has to rely on the API's debugging mechanisms to inspect the output of the computations performed. Several tools are available for this purpose, some of them are open source. Open source tools are great to integrate in already existing projects such as 3D engines since they allow the required customizations. The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly we provide an overview of the existing open source debugging tools for OpenGL and secondly we discuss the integration of one of such tools in an existing 3D engine.