Shaders are a whole other beast entirely, but when you're ready for them you should be able to integrate them into your VBO renderer without too much trouble.
I recently embarked on the adventure of learning shaders and was surprised at how easy they really are, once you understand the basic concepts. I mean, I'm not writing anything terribly advanced yet, just simple stuff like animating vertices, generating new vertices in geometry shaders, applying textures and effects (blur, ripple, pixellation so far) in the fragment shader and its really easy to do. And a lot of fun to see the results! Soon I will try more advanced stuff, so I'll see how that goes, but for reasonably simple stuff learning GLSL shouldn't be a problem.
[font="arial, sans-serif"]Thank you, this thread encouraged me enough to stop thinking about the problemsand move on to implementation. My concern is to maintain 60FPS running the program on a notebook is not very new. My graphics card is an ATI Mobility Radeon2400 so it is not very powerful. But I hope that your dedicated 256mb is enough:).
I was thinking about creating something with GLSL for mapping textures in mysquare. That would be more efficient than simply using the opengl commands?
Sometimes I confuse what can be done in GLSL to improve performance.
Thank you all.[/font]
Well, as I see it, the GPU is great at taking in a set of commands and then applying them to a large amount of data (thats hopefully already in VRAM) without any further instruction from the CPU. As such, the more you can have the GPU do without CPU hand-holding, the better. For example, I am going to be animating and moving all articles in my particle system in shaders, so the CPU just tells the shader about new particles and then the GPU handles them from there (no need to copy them back to the CPU). Keep the GPU busy with graphics related stuff and free up the CPU for gameplay, physics and AI.
Once you use GLSL for anything, you have to do texture mapping through it too. But don't worry, texture mapping is really really easy to do in GLSL.
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