README.md

FLAMEGPU 2 Visualiser

This repository contains the components for the interactive, real-time visualiser for FLAME GPU 2.x. This repository is automatically pulled in by FLAMEGPU2 when the FLAMEGPU_VISUALISATION option is enabled within the CMake configuration. It is unlikely to be useful independently.

Requirements

• CMake >= 3.18
• CUDA >= 11.0 and a Compute Capability >= 3.5 NVIDIA GPU.
• C++17 capable C++ compiler (host), compatible with the installed CUDA version
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 (Windows)
  • make and GCC >= 8.1
• git
• SDL
• GLM (consistent C++/GLSL vector maths functionality)
• GLEW (GL extension loader)
• FreeType (font loading)
• DevIL (image loading)
• Fontconfig (Linux only, font detection)

Optionally:

• cpplint for linting code

Building the Visualiser

The Visualiser uses CMake, as a cross-platform process, for configuring and generating build directives, e.g. Makefile or .vcxproj. CMake can be configured from the command line or through a GUI application. Several editors / IDEs also provide CMake integration.

To build the visualiser under linux in Release mode using the command line:

# Create a build directory
mkdir -p build
cd build
# Configure CMake, i.e. for Release builds for consumer Pascal and newer GPUs
cmake .. -DCMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES=61 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
# Build all targets using 8 threads.
cmake --build . --target all -j 8
# Or directly via make
make all -j 8

Or, if building under windows you must specify the Visual Studio version to use.

cmake .. -A x64 -G "Visual Studio 16 2019"

When using multi-config generators such as visual studio, the build configuration is selected at build time rather than at CMake configure time.

cmake --build . --config Release --target ALL_BUILD -j 8

Alternatively, open the generated .sln file manually, or open visual studio via CMake:

cmake --open .

Lint Only Configuration

The project can be configured to allow linting without the need for CUDA or OpenGL to be available (i.e. CI).

To do this, set the FLAMEGPU_ALLOW_LINT_ONLY CMake option to ON. I.e.:

cmake .. -DFLAMEGPU_ALLOW_LINT_ONLY=ON
cmake --build . --target lint_flamegpu_visualiser

Git Tags

To allow simple version pinning of the visualiser from within the main FLAMEGPU/FLAMEGPU2 repository, tags are used to identify which version of the visualisation repository are used in each release of the main repository.

The main repository uses semantic versioning, with tags vX.Y.Z[-PRERELEASE]. Versions of this repository included by the main repository are tagged with flamegpu-X.Y.Z[-PRERELEASE] to allow standalone versioning options in the future.

I.e. the initial alpha release of FLAMEGPU/FLAMEGPU2 v2.0.0-alpha corresponds to the flamegpu-2.0.0-alpha tag. Subsequent pre-releases may not update the tag to be an exact match.