Programming and User Guide for Equalizer 1.4

Equalizer Programming and User Guide

I’ve just uploaded the review version of the Programming and User Guide for the upcoming 1.4 release of Equalizer, and to a certain extent, Collage.

This one packs 111 pages of content (118 total) and 63 figures. In a couple of weeks I’ll create the final hardcopy version on Amazon/CreateSpace.

What’s New?

This edition has, among the customary full review pass, a lot of new content. Starting with a full new chapter on Sequel and the associated polygonal rendering example, continuing with new section for application-specific scaling factors in immersive environments, region of interest for compositing and load-balancing and zeroconf discovery in Collage, finally finishing with a substantial rewrite of the section on distributed objects in Collage.

What?

The book is structured in two parts: The User Guide, laying the foundation on parallel rendering and scalability algorithms, and then explaining the configuration of visualization systems for Equalizer applications. The appendix contains a full reference on the file format.

The second part, the Programming Guide, gradually introduces programming parallel rendering applications. Starting with the basics in eqHello, the complexity is gradually increased with a chapter on Sequel and Equalizer using the respective example application. After this, an advanced features section focuses on introducing and demonstrating on specific features in isolation. It finishes of with a chapter on the Collage network library.

Why?

The Programming and User Guide is the ‘OpenGL red book’ of Equalizer. It consolidates all the documentation available in various places (Equalizer website, mailing list, github feature issues, my head) into a single document. Apart from gathering this information, through the format emerges a bigger picture, putting design decisions in context.