Howdy,
I’ve been learning the OpenGL ropes via LWJGL (programmable pipeline), and have got to the point that I’d like to create a more complex scene than just the odd rotating cube or two. However, I’ve become aware that there aren’t many resources out there that actually focus on OpenGL program organisation/structure, particularly in terms of OOP (not that I can find anyway!). I’ve had a good googling, but the results are limited or vague; It could’ve been that I wasn’t using the right terminology in my search. I’ve got some general ideas about how I’ll go about it, but want to run it past the JGO community for opinions & suggestion.
I gather that the most important thing is to try and minimise state changes and pushing data to the GPU; as such, it’s best to render similar objects consecutively (other fancy words like ‘geometry batching’ also popped out at me). So as an example, I was thinking of doing the following:
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Lets say I created a farming program, with a Sheep, Pig and Cow class. Each of these classes holds a static list/reference to every instance of the class (i.e. instances are added or removed from the list when they are created or destroyed).
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The class statically holds all OpenGL state common to each instance (i.e. VAO’s, VBO’s, shaders, textures).
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When it comes time to render, I call a static render() method on each class (i.e. Sheep.render(), Pig.render(), Cow.render()). This method sets the common OpenGL state once, then runs through each instance and renders it, perhaps by calling a non-static render() method on each instance. The instances themselves are responsible for setting uniforms particular to that instance, such as transformations or texture coords, and making the final draw call.
So in general, my questions are:
- Does this sounds like a decent approach, and do you guys do things simillar or differently?
- Is there a better, or more accepted way to do this?
- Will this scale well as my program increases in size &/or complexity? (Keeping in mind at this stage I’ll just be messing around whilst learning, but with a view to creating a full-blown program in the future).
- Are there any good resources out there on the net that focus on OpenGL program organisation, that I should be looking at?
Cheers muchly,
nerb.