CableGuy

Are you seeking to create a tilemap based level editor or polygonal one? (Also I assume you are aiming at a 2d game)

Both cases usually have different representation of the game world. With a tilemap, a 2D matrix specifying which tile to use at each (X,Y) is the most logical.

A polygonal map representation, at it's most naive form, will store an array of polygons. The representation of the game world greatly affects how you would implement

the level editing area in your editor

I guess you can use glGetTexImage to get the texture data and then create an appropriate OpenCV matrix and point it to the data retrieved from OpenGL.

I used the same approach for the my quad tree implementation. Faces only have x and y coordinates, but the bounding boxes for each node is 3d.

For culling there is not need to convert each face. The bounding boxes are already 3d and you just perform culling on them. Once you have found a leaf node which is visible you add it's indices. Same goes for picking  until you reach a leaf node, where you will have to check each triangle with the picking ray.

 

Hope this helps.

I have most of my resources pointed to as shared_ptr's. I know it is not the best solution but it works for now.

Also why do you need to cache the rendering state? In my code, a list is prepared containing all things to be rendered this frame. Then it is sorted to reduce state changes

and then rendered in a single function removing the need to store a global cache.

You need to go to Linker->Input->Additional Dependencies and add the lib files there (only write their name, no need for full path ie. sdl.lib)
SDL.dll should reside in a place where your exectuable can find it as with any dll: in the application directory, Windows directory, etc...

EDIT: reread you post Additional Dependencies should contain the name of the libraries as I wrote, the libraries path should be entered in Linker->General->Additional Library Directories