Hi,
I've always liked how SFML makes its modules almost independent from one another. You can have SFML's event management on SFML's Window and do the rendering with a completely different library, you can use SFML's sound without even having a window, and so on.
But recently I've been exploring Windows window customization to a degree SFML doesn't allow, and on top of that I wanted to build my own event management system (closer to GLFW's than SFML's).
And here the truth hurt me: I couldn't find a single way to use only SFML's Graphics component onto an existing window without it being intrusive about the event system too.
As far as I could read from past topics, SFML creates its own context on windows, which is fine, but if the only way to do that is creating an sf::RenderWindow, that will force SFML's window management and event system as well, in particular replacing the window procedure and the data cointained in the user pointer on the Windows implementation.
That's a consequence of sf::RenderWindow inheriting from sf::Window, which exists for the purpose of adding SFML's event system to a window (if my understanding is correct)
Is there any way to achieve what I'm looking for (without rendering SFML stuff to a temporary rendertexture and copy that texture in opengl to the buffer)?
If there isn't, I'd move this topic in the feature requests section and I'd propose the addition of either
- an "sf::RenderContext" which is built by passing it a raw OpenGL context and exposes draw() and clear() on that. The construction should fail if the context is not created with settings expected by SFML (like double buffering).
- an "sf::RenderOnlyWindow" which sets up the required render context, exposes the drawing methods, but does NOT interfere with a window's event management.
Either should also expose a context resizing method to be called manually.
