Re: [Freeglut-developer] Still More Status

[Brian P. <br...@tu...>]

Steve Baker wrote:
> Fay John F Contr AAC/WMG wrote:
> 
>> OK, I think we're talking about two different things here.  I am 
>> talking about using one rendering context for more than one window.  I 
>> think you are talking about sharing resources like textures and 
>> display lists across more than one rendering context.  Does this 
>> change anything?
> 
> 
> Eh?   I don't understand.
> 
> You can't have two windows be one rendering context.   A window *is*
> a rendering context (or possibly more than one if it has overlays or
> something).

In general, a window != a rendering context.  In GLUT there's been a 
one-to-one correspondence but that's just a GLUT convention.


> The best you can do is to have textures, display lists, etc shared
> between two or more rendering contexts - so that all of your windows
> can share the same textures and models more simply without duplicating
> them and wasting valuable memory down in the graphics card.
> 
> If there is some freaky way to do multiple windows in one rendering
> context in Windows - then I suggest we ignore it since whatever we'd
> implement would be non-portable and that's a big no-no.

I don't know about Windows, but with GLX you can certainly use one 
rendering context with any number of windows.  You just call 
glXMakeCurrent() to bind the context to whichever window you want to 
render to.  You just have to be sure the context's visual matches the 
window's visual.

I'd have expected Windows to support the same thing.

-Brian