Grab current OpenGL context with Qt - qt

I have written a Qt based dll with some OpenGL calls. If I load my DLL from my Qt application with QGLWidget used for rendering, a call to QGLContext::currentContext from the DLL returns the correct context. But if use my DLL in a non Qt based program there is no QGLContext returned. As a result I couldn't use QGLShaderProgram in non Qt based apps.
What I am doing wrong?
P.S. Direct calls to glCreateProgram and so on in my library seem to work fine, but I want to use Qt classes.

I want to use Qt classes.
Then you should use your DLL in an application that uses Qt. By requiring the Qt classes, your DLL now requires Qt. If you want your DLL to work when Qt isn't available, then you shouldn't use Qt.
Besides, the Qt classes for shaders and programs aren't anything you couldn't whip up in 30 minutes.

Related

Integrating ros to an existing qt application

I have a QML, OpenCV application on qt5 which uses qmake and has a .pro file. I want to add publishers/subscribers to my qt project to publish video stream and instructions etc. I tried to use catkin_create_qt_pkg command to create a template and transfer my project to the template but there were numerous problems which made me question my approach. The ros-qt template uses Cmakelist and .ui instead of qml. So, I will need to change some things to integrate them.
First, is it possible to use ros with qmake and .pro instead of cmake. It would be easier to add just ros publishers and listeners to my existing application than changing the entire QML application. If not, how do I convert qmake and .pro to cmake and Cmakelist.txt (assuming that I can use QML with ros). Also, although it doesn't sound well, is it possible to use .pro for qt and Cmakelist.txt for ros in the same package?
Second, is it safe to use qt5 and qml with ros? The ros_qt app template uses qt4, not qt5. Here is the app template.

Is there any way to use QtWebEngine without OpenGL?

I'm trying to get QtWebEngine running on a VM and am having difficulties. According to the answer to this question:
Eventually I realised that OpenGL 3.3 wouldn't work easily on virtual machines .. yet. I had to boot from ubuntu usb and work from there by installing latest mesa 3d package.
Is there a way to get QtWebEngine to work without OpenGL? I'm not directly using any OpenGL calls, nor do I need any 3d capabilities. I just want to embed a QWebEngineView to display dynamic HTML pages. I'm guessing this should be possible since Chrome works on the same VM without an issue.
I don't think there is a way to use the Qt WebEngine without OpenGL. It is not very explicitly said in the documentation, but here's what I understood from what I found.
About Chromium
As it is said here, QtWebEngine integrates chromium's fast moving web capabilities into Qt. Plus, it is Chromium that allows the manipulation of OpenGL via the Qt Quick scene graph (source) :
Chromium is tightly integrated to the Qt Quick scene graph, which is
based on OpenGL ES 2.0 or OpenGL 2.0 for its rendering. This provides
you with one-pass compositing of web content and all the Qt Quick UI.
The integration to Chromium is transparent to developers, who just
work with Qt and JavaScript.
It is also said that both the render process and the GUI process should share an OpenGL context :
Because the render process is separated from the GUI process, they
should ideally share an OpenGL context to enable one process to access
the resources uploaded by the other, such as images or textures.
About the Qt WebEngine itself
We just talked about the Qt's GUI : in fact, the Qt WebEngine is not dependent of this GUI (page rendering and JavaScript execution are separated from the GUI process into the Qt WebEngine process), but remember that if you want your application to work, you will need to share an OpenGL context between both processes. In particular, this is achieved by default with a QSurfaceFormat, which has a OpenGLContextProfile accessible by the function QSurfaceFormat::profile(). Now, we look back at the Qt WebEngine platform notes which states :
If a new default QSurfaceFormat with a modified OpenGL profile has to
be set, it should be set before the application instance is declared,
to make sure that all created OpenGL contexts use the same OpenGL
profile.
On OS X, if the default QSurfaceFormat is set after the application
instance, the application will exit with qFatal(), and print a message
that the default QSurfaceFormat should be set before the application
instance.
If we look at the source code of Qt, calls to OpenGL are made in several important files, like qtwebengine\src\core\web_engine_context.cpp or qtwebengine\src\webengine\api\qtwebengineglobal.cpp. Moreover, I also found calls to OpenGL in functions from the sources in qtwebengine\src\3rdparty\chromium\, so I suspect that Chromium needs to call OpenGL functions sometimes.
In short
The Qt WebEngine is using Chromium (which doesn't necessarily use OpenGL) and also Qt GUI, which uses an OpenGL context which has to be shared by the Web Engine. Thus, my conclusion is that you can't use the Qt WebEngine without OpenGL.
I had the same problem on my VM environment trying to start an application that uses QtWebEngine and it crashed.
I will add this answer as a reference - although Sergey Khasanov mentioned it already in the comment above
Use Software Qt Quick2DRenderer - see https://doc.qt.io/QtQuick2DRenderer/
To do that, simply set the environment variable:
export QMLSCENE_DEVICE=softwarecontext
then restart your application. It might still complain about
libEGL warning: GLX/DRI2 is not supported
libEGL warning: DRI2: failed to authenticate
but (in my case) it finally worked!

QT5.0.2 project needs more DLLs than QT4.8

Recently we moved to QT 5.0.2 from QT4.8. Our project now needs more DLL files than the earlier. It requires qml, opengl, printer modules. However we did not use any of these modules in our application. The size of exe file increased due to additional DLLs.
QT-= qml opengl -> did not exclude this module from our application.
Are these additional DLLs are compulsory for Qt 5.0.2 ? Is there any way to come out from this? We need to exclude these dlls to reduce exe size.
Some of the modules you use may be dependent on those you don't, which means your project depends on them indirectly. For example, by default, some modules (QtWebKit, QtMultimedia) utilize ANGLE which uses OpenGL. You can try to trace those dependencies by using a program named Dependency Walker (available here). The Qt GUI has changed a lot since 4.8, and there are now separate modules for printing and other functions (see here).
Sources:
Qt 5 on Windows ANGLE and OpenGL
Qt 5 Deployment on Windows
By the way, someone has (had) a similar problem: http://www.qtcentre.org/archive/index.php/t-52102.html. (Unfortunately, there is no solution in that link.)
It turned out that this is actually a bug in Qt.

Re-built Qt5.0.2 with OpenGL, how to use with Qt Creator

I need to move my code from a C++/OpenGL and Config.txt situation to a UI friendly space. I was told here to try Qt and installed it in Windows.
The issue I ran into is that it did not support the OpenGL version I needed out of the box and I had to rebuild with the -opengl desktop parameter.
First time doing this, but was able to follow the instructions (and a ton of Google) and it "succesfully" was built. My issue now is I am unsure how to make the files I have work with Qt Creator.
I copied over all the folders from the qt5 folder created by git over to the Src folder in Qt5.0.1/5.0.1/Src but the hellogl example still wouldn't build.
I checked the options and it was pointing to a qmake in Qt5.0.1/5.0.1/msvc2010/bin so I copied over the qmake.exe from qtbase/qmake over to this folder (renaming the old one) and now Qt Creator builds the hellogl example on my Windows system.
My worry is, did I do this the right way? I fumbled around and got something, but is this the way I should have proceeded after I built the qt5 from git? If not what was the way I should have gone about making it all work with the Qt Creator?
The typical way to utilize the modern OpenGL the feature set (post fixed-function pipeline) in Qt is by utilizing a extension wrangler (GLEW) that finds all the OpenGL functions your graphics drivers support BEFORE Qt includes any OpenGL headers.
To accomplish this simply do the following:
If you already haven't, download GLEW (or another extension wrangler if you wish) and install it in your system path. I would recommend the 32 bit package as it will be easier to work with.
#include glew.h in your source code before any other Qt header includes that may use OpenGL headers. Just to be safe, make glew.h the first header included in your source code.
In your Qt project's .pro file add the line LIBS += -lGLEW (mac/linux) or LIBS += -lglew32 (windows).
Note: Beware of using Qt OpenGL wrappers when implementing an application that uses post fixed-function pipeline facilities. Qt 5's OpenGL wrappers all operate using the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification which may cause problems when interleaved with your OpenGL 3/4 code. Even QPainter can become troublesome when performing overpainting on a QGLWidget due to it's heavy use of the fixed-function transformation stack. I am currently developing a library called QGLX that provides alternative Qt wrappers designed for complying to the modern desktop OpenGL specification. The beta will hopefully be released by the end of this year for Qt 4 & Qt 5.

Modify Qt's shared library code while application starts

I'm trying to create some kind of a server which allows me to start Qt's applications on remote machine via web browser.
I'm wondering it is possible to change/hide some symbols from Qt library (I thought about QApplication or QCoreApplication) without making any changes in code of application (I assume that it is already compiled and uses Qt shared library) and compiling my whole tailor-made Qt libs?
The reason why I need to do this is because I want to install my own specific EventFilter to QApplication and also be able to push my own created events to Qt application.
It also would be great if the solution could be used on all platforms :D
P.S. I know that it will not be possible I could subclass QApplication and modify all Qt apps to use my derived class but I would like to do this more craftily. ;-)
The tool GammaRay does all kinds of injecting code into Qt methods at runtime to attach and debug running Qt applications. You might want to have a look at its code base to see how it is done.

Resources