What's under the hood?

If you are a new Irrlicht Engine user, and have a newbie-question, this is the forum for you. You may also post general programming questions here.
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stdlib
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Jun 07, 2015 1:43 am

What's under the hood?

Post by stdlib »

Juding from this page (http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Irrlicht_- ... darstellen), it looks to me like Irrlicht is using OpenGL's immediate mode rendering, according to that example, anyway? I want to be able to load the graphics into the GPU as VBOs. I was initially doing this in OpenGL, but one of my friends was unable to run the code (kept crashing on anything VBO-related, even with the correct drivers). The immediate mode rendering worked for him, but was slow. I compiled an Irrlicht demo for him to run today and it renders correctly, with skeletal animation and everything. Unless Irrlicht does all of this with immediate mode, it must be using VBOs, but why exactly would VBOs be working for him now?

I prefer writing all of my code from scratch (already did skeletal animation and collision and all sorts of stuff in C, using OpenGL for rendering), and I would like to use the GPU for VBOs, so, what is under the hood of Irrlicht? How does it render graphics, exactly? Thanks!
CuteAlien
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Re: What's under the hood?

Post by CuteAlien »

Irrlicht doesn't use VBO's by default but you can enable them per mesh. Check IMeshBuffer::setHardwareMappingHint for the options. (IMesh also has that function so you can set it for all meshbuffers).
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stdlib
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Jun 07, 2015 1:43 am

Re: What's under the hood?

Post by stdlib »

Cool, thank you.
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