I have created a parser that will load my custom geometry. when it loads the geometry it places the vertex array into a VBO. I want to make many of the same object or introduce new objects into the scene but use them later as one is playing the game. how do i store geometry so it is not loading from a file into the VBO when it is called upon? but rather from some sort of buffer that holds it in an efficient way until its needed perhaps.

one of the things I am trying to set up are missiles for a tank game. I want the user to be able to just shut a 100 missiles back to back. each missile geometry is the same. how would you recommend I create multiple missiles with our having to load the geometry for each missile every time the user fires the missile?

thanks

You didn't specify if you are using c/c++ so I'll assume c++.

The easiest way to do this would be to pass around your VAO id. For every object that uses that mesh just have a copy of that VAO id. When you get ready to draw a missile for example you just bind the vao, send in your objects world matrix ( to the shader uniform ), and draw. This is called instancing.

Another way to handle it is more work but more robust, create a Manager Class that manages your Meshes. You have a vector of pointers to mesh objects ( use unique_ptr ) in the mesh manager and you can get a pointer to a managed mesh object, from that Manager class, by file name.

Managing Textures and Shaders can also be done in similar ways.

I am not understanding "powly k", What do you mean just keep their locations in a texture? also what are these specific OpenGL draw calls for instancing?

Regarding this part:

how do i store geometry so it is not loading from a file into the VBO when it is called upon?

You seem unaware that you can have more than one VBO created. Psuedocode for load-time might look something like this:

GLuint geometryBuffers[NUM_GEOMETRY];

glGenBuffers (NUM_GEOMETRY, geometryBuffers);

for (int i = 0; i < NUM_GEOMETRY; i++)
{
    LoadGeometryItem (i);
    glBindBuffer (GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, geometryBuffers);
    glBufferData (GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, ...);
}

And for drawing:

for (int i = 0; i < NUM_GEOMETRY; i++)
{
    glBindBuffer (GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, geometryBuffers);
    glEnableVertexAttribArray (...);
    glVertexAttribPointer (...);
    glDrawArrays (...);
}