I’m aware that not everybody does (yet) know what OWL actually is, but for those that do, and for those: yes, I know I have to write a blog article about OWL at some point in time to introduce it – but this is not the blog post that’ll do this.
For those that do know what OWL is, and are currently using it: Please be aware that the “root” github repo for OWL has changed: due to broader use OWL is now officially hosted under the github NVIDIA org (to be more precise, at https://github.com/NVIDIA/owl ). If you’re using OWL in your project, please make sure to update your git submodule URL accordingly, as all future updates, bugfixes, etc, will all happen in this repo.
Unfortunately, this move has forced a few (one time) changes: In particular, whereas the original repo used “master” and “devel” branches (and often had multiple different users’ feature branches as well) the new repo will only have a single “main” branch, and all feature-“branches” should henceforth be in dedicated forks and get merged in via PRs. Also, old and new repo do not share a common history, so merging changes from one to the other via PRs will not be possible. Thus: if you do use OWL, please update your remote ASAP (and ideally, fully re-clone from the new location).
On the upside: this move to a new upstream repo not only comes with higher visiblity, it also comes with some long-overdue cleanups and maintenance. In particular, all the interactive samples – and with that, the dependencies to GLFW and OpenGL (for the interactive viewer window stuff) – have been removed from the project, leading to a much simpler cmake project and build process. I also added some basic CI to check build status on both windows and Linux, fixed some Windows DLL declspec issues, etc.
Any issues with the new version: please file a github issue – and of course, do so at the new location at https://github.com/NVIDIA/OWL/issues
Happy coding.
Ingo's Blog 