Tracing Your OpenGL Application with Vogl Just Got Easier!

VoglEditor now has support for launching and tracing your application, directly from the UI. Previously, (and still available) you'd have to launch your application from the command line, which could add confusion on where to supply vogl or application command line arguments.

> cd vogl_build/bin  
> VOGL_CMD_LINE="--vogl_tracefile vogltrace.glxspheres64.bin" 
  LD_PRELOAD=$(readlink -f libvogltrace64.so) ./glxspheres64 

Also, it is not clear what options vogl has to control its tracing behavior; what would you run to find out those options?!? (Answer: there actually is no executable to run which will provide that help information, but the information is at the bottom of this post)

Generate Trace

The new addition to VoglEditor is available via a "Generate Trace" button on the main toolbar, and provides a clean interface for launching your application as well as setting some common command line options.

Application to trace: Path to the application that you'd like to trace.

Application arguments: Command line arguments to your application.

Output trace file: Path to the resulting trace file.

vogl options:

• Use SteamLauncher
•  When launching a Steam game, this is the preferred approach to enable tracing, although you'll need to sync the vogl_chroot repo to get the script. If the script is not available, the option will be disabled.
• You should already have Steam running prior to using this option, otherwise the client may appear to hang after the application has closed.
• The dialog asking to load the new trace file may pop-up before the application has been launched; this is due to the way that the script works. Please wait until AFTER you exit your application to load the trace file.
• Application arguments are not currently supported by the script.
• The "Application to trace" should be the game ID, or one of the following pre-configured names:
• 214910 - AirConflicts
• 400       - Portal1
• 218060 - BitTripRunner
• 570       - Dota2
• 35720   - Trine2
• 440       - TF2
• 41070   - Sam3
• 1500     - Darwinia
• 550       - L4D2
• 1500     - Darwinia2
• 570       - Dota2Beta
• 221810 - TheCave
• 220200 - KerbalSpaceProgram
• 44200   - GalconFusion
• 201040 - GalconLegends
• 25000   - Overgrowth
• 211820 - Starbound
• 64-bit
• Enable if your application is 64-bit
• Force debug context
• Force the OpenGL Debug Context so that additional driver performance information can be output
• Gather call stacks
• If your application has been compiled with symbols, this will tell the tracer to gather a call stack at every OpenGL API call
• Disable glProgramBinary
• Applications which use binary programs will be able to replay on the same driver and hardware as they were traced, but may not replay correctly after updating the graphics driver, or replaying on a different platform. To solve this, the tracer can disable the GL_ARB_get_program_binary extension and will force all calls to glProgramBinary() to fail, which should cause your application to take a fallback path. These calls should replay correctly and the replayed stream will reflect the fallback path of your application.

The trace will complete when your application exits, and VoglEditor will ask you if you'd like to load the resulting trace file, allowing you to quickly dive in and identify any rendering artifacts.

Command Line Vogl Tracing Options

Although the UI only supports 3 of the vogl tracing options, a lot more are available at the command line and we plan to integrate UI support for these functionalities in the future. My apologees for not adding detailed help for these options, but I believe the names themselves should be sufficient, and the code is available if you wish to understand them more thoroughly ;-)

• "vogl_dump_gl_full"
• "vogl_dump_gl_calls"
• "vogl_dump_gl_buffers"
• "vogl_dump_gl_shaders"
• "vogl_sleep_at_startup <duration>"
• "vogl_pause"
• "vogl_long_pause"
• "vogl_quiet"
• "vogl_debug"
• "vogl_verbose"
• "vogl_flush_files_after_each_call"
• "vogl_flush_files_after_each_swap"
• "vogl_disable_signal_interception"
• "vogl_logfile <filename>"
• "vogl_logfile_append"
• "vogl_tracefile <output trace filename>"
• "vogl_tracepath <path for generated files>"
• "vogl_dump_png_screenshots"
• "vogl_dump_jpeg_screenshots"
• "vogl_jpeg_quality"
• "vogl_screenshot_prefix <prefix for files>"
• "vogl_hash_backbuffer"
• "vogl_dump_backbuffer_hashes <filename>"
• "vogl_sum_hashing"
• "vogl_null_mode"
• "vogl_force_debug_context"
• "vogl_disable_client_side_array_tracing"
• "vogl_disable_gl_program_binary"
• "vogl_func_tracing"
• "vogl_backtrace_all_calls"
• "vogl_backtrace_no_calls"
• "vogl_exit_after_x_frames <frame count>"