displaying quads (in relation to sprites)
Author
In my project I am going to have some sprites mainly used for small entities and items. At times there could be a few on the screen, I am not sure how many maybe 50? How should I display them, currently most if not all will be billboarded and could be moving each with own texture. Currently I would just do glBegin(GL_QUADS) do the texCoords and the verts for one, then move on to next one. Since I will only have 4 verts for each sprite and each sprite has different texture, would it be a waste in creating a vertex array or even a vbo for each sprite?
-THACO
Quote:Original post by THACO
In my project I am going to have some sprites mainly used for small entities and items. At times there could be a few on the screen, I am not sure how many maybe 50? How should I display them, currently most if not all will be billboarded and could be moving each with own texture. Currently I would just do glBegin(GL_QUADS) do the texCoords and the verts for one, then move on to next one. Since I will only have 4 verts for each sprite and each sprite has different texture, would it be a waste in creating a vertex array or even a vbo for each sprite?
-THACO
Creating a display list should be good enough and simpler ( VA and VBO may reduce performance *)
50 sprites is not a great number: also an old card is able to render 10-20000 quads per second (ie ~100-1000 @ 100fps ) !!!
Some hints:
- use a great texture in which you store different quad textures then use tex coordinates to map the right 'sub textures' onto the quad.
- sort sprites by texture ( change texture can be expensive )
- use texture objects ( see glBindTextures )
- use a sort of hash map ( for example a simple grid ) to cull sprites out of the viewport; better if you can cull more than one sprite at once!
EDIT: (*) in this special 2D application
Author
Thanks for those hints, I have been using texture objects, and also I have considered using bigger textures, currently I only do that for animated sprites but I will see if I can extend that. The one problem with display lists is that most of the textures will be billboarded so I will need to modify the verticies, they will not be constant (each one will be modified differently) so I cannot put a glrotate or translate before I call the display list. I have no used display list in actual code just read about them (only used vertex array and vbos). Thanks for reminding me about culling also and sorting sprites by texture.
-THACO
-THACO
Once you have the quad in a display list, a simple transformation before calling the list can bill-board it for you. All you need is a transformation matrix that has opposite rotation from the current modelview matrix. I implemented this effect nicely from This Tutorial
Quote:would it be a waste in creating a vertex array or even a vbo for each sprite?
yes.
for 4 verts just use immediate mode, if u have sprites that share the same texture then u can batch them together and use VAs (i wouldnt worry about VBO)
just noticed youre talking about 50 quads in that case just use begin(..)
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