Use glDepthMask.

Quote:Original post by LilBudyWizer
Use glDepthMask.

That will just give you incorrect results, you still want the depth test you just want the particles to be correctly ordered.

RenderScene();glEnable( GL_BLEND );glBlendFunc( GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA );// 1. sort by Z// 2. render particles in order of://    furthest away to closest to camera/eye.RenderParticlesByZ();

you probably iterate the list of particles per frame at least once, you could do a simple counting sort (or radix) to order the Z values loosely.

EDIT:
this just came to mind; i'm not sure if it will work but its worth a try. Render the particles to the frame buffer but disable color writes then re-draw the particles with color write & alpha blending on and the depth buffer off. so something like this:

glColorMask(GL_FALSE, GL_FALSE, GL_FALSE, GL_FALSE);RenderParticles();glDepthMask(GL_FALSE);glColorMask(GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE);RenderParticles();glDepthMask(GL_TRUE);

silvermane, I think you're confusing disabling writes with turning off the depth test. If you just try to draw a decal on a polygon you get some of the pixels of the decal and some of the polygon because of rounding errors. They should both be the same depth, but they aren't. If you turn off the depth write then it writes the colors for both of them in the order you tell it to. Then you turn off the color buffer and write the depth values. You don't want to overlay the image you drew, but you want the correct depth values for the rest of your rendering.

Writing the depth values then the colors would pretty well require that you turn off depth testing for writing the colors. The only time you should turn off depth testing is when the stencil buffer is set to keep you from writing where you shouldn't.

Hey LilBudyWizer, yea i think i see what you're saying; FlyinDeath you can ignore my "EDIT:" solution - like it said, it was just a stab in the dark [wink]. I found a particle system example over at GLFW and they simply disable depth-write and draw the particles..