Running this package headlessly?

[haudren]

Hello,

Is it possible to run this package entirely headlessly? By that I mean on a server machine and without any display connected. I think the use of GLFW makes it difficult, but I was wondering if anyone had run into similar issues.

Maybe it would be useful as well for #13 ?

Thanks!

[marip8]

I haven't ever tried running this package headless, but this GLFW documentation indicates that it's possible to create a context with a hidden window that never gets displayed. This might be close to what you're looking for

[haudren]

This is a little bit different: as far as I understand this still creates a window and will crash if there is no display connected.

Indeed this seems to be already set:

gl_depth_sim/src/gl_depth_sim/sim_depth_camera.cpp

Line 156 in 6a810a8

glfwWindowHint(GLFW_VISIBLE, false);

But if you run unset DISPLAY to simulate a headless environment, the examples crash with:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  Failed to create GLFW window

I will have a look and see if it's possible to replace GLFW with regular EGL, as is done in pyrender.

[haudren]

As a follow-up to this issue, I have created a fork here:
https://github.com/ascentai/gl_depth_sim

The main differences are:

• I merged Convert to be a ROS-agnostic pure-CMake package #12 because it was easier for testing
• I removed the GLFW dependency and replaced it with EGL

This allows to run headlessly, and solves my use case. I'm ready to PR back here, but those are fairly changes, would you be open to merging?