So being onboarded into Gateware was fun to say the least. My tasks for onboarding into Gateware were simple at first, recursively clone the repositories and verify they build. Since I have a dual-boot machine I can test Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows implementations fairly quickly. Mac on the other hand wanted to cause a bit of trouble by not being updateable. After eventually getting the required software installed and validated everything was cloned properly, I started working on the GSamples.
GSamples is a new repository that aims to help developers who are unfamiliar with how Gateware operates into showing how to utilize the library. There were some samples already provided such as the GVulkanSurface and GOpenGLSurface which helped give me a jumpstart into what was expected. The first sample I was to work on was for the audio interfaces GSound and GMusic. As I started to make the samples, I found that isPlaying wasn't implemented into the main API which was what I used to identify if the sample should stop or continue playing. Since the Audio Interfaces needed a running application to continue playing the sound, this created a bit of a snag. Though thankfully Alex Cusaac mentioned opting to use sleep_for and yield instead.
So safe to say I was out of the clear for the time being. Turns out testing all available platforms is really important. The audio I happened to use for the sample had a formatting issue which exposed an underlying offset bit read in the GMusic implementation. With that fix pushed, I was able to continue validating the GMusic and GSound samples. These samples helped me understand how the Gateware Developers use a Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD) Pipeline to always test and push updated releases.
While I wasn't familiar with CI/CD I have grown to like this format of development. The next couple of samples I worked on were GInput and GBuffered Input. Since I wanted to print out the ASCII equivalent of the key pressed, CI/CD allowed me to pull the latest version of Gateware and implement that fix.
My future work with Gateware will be to inevitably incorporate the GNodeFactory module. This module will help manage large 3D Transformation Hierarchies like scene graphs. For now I am researching into how I can parallelize and optimize operations in the factory before implementing them. To accomplish this task, I was requested to look into GConcurrent, GThreadShared, and GDaemon. These modules in Gateware are also on the coding chopping block for samples to create. Additionally GVector, GMatrix, GQuaternion are also going to be implemented over the next two weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment