OpenGL VBOs

[sknnywhiteman]

I've been reading around recently about how people render things in OpenGL, and I see that most people who have been working with OpenGL for a while have been using Vertex Buffer Obects. I became interested in them and started reading around people's OpenGL code to create it. I tried using them, however, and I'm not able to use any functions like glGenBuffers(1, &IndexVBOID), and glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, VertexVBOID). Does anybody else use VBOs with SFML or know of any way to use them? I could use Glut if I needed to, but I'd rather not.
If anyone could help me, it'd be appreciated greatly!

[G.]

VBO are an extension of OpenGL, so you need to include glew.h (which will include OpenGL for you)
http://glew.sourceforge.net/install.html
(Don't worry, you don't need GLUT)

[sknnywhiteman]

Okay. I got glew, now... For glew32.dll, should I include that in only system32 or is that a library I need to bring with my code like the SFML binaries?

[Nexus]

SFML 2 provides a low-level API that lets you render objects with vertex arrays (sf::VertexArray). Maybe you don't need to use OpenGL for the task you try to achieve.

[binary1248]

We at SFGUI have made extensive/exclusive use of VBOs for our rendering. If you are brave enough and have lots of time you can look for useful pieces of code in http://redmine.boxbox.org/projects/sfgui/repository/revisions/master/entry/src/SFGUI/Renderer.cpp

95% of it is probably irrelevant for you but I guess you can see how we made it work with SFML along with all those nasty hacks

We also had to use GLee instead of GLEW because of build issues in certain configurations.

A word of warning: Using VBOs with SFML is associated with many many pitfalls. Do not expect to get it working until after a very long time and numerous sessions of reading through SFML source.

I would thoroughly assess the situation first and ask if VBOs are really needed and if they would even cause a performance increase. As Nexus said SFML provides a "low-level" API that wraps around OpenGL's own Vertex Arrays so it isn't really that low level anymore. If that suffices for you then I would recommend you use that instead.

[Laurent]

A word of warning: Using VBOs with SFML is associated with many many pitfalls. Do not expect to get it working until after a very long time and numerous sessions of reading through SFML source.

Anything that can be improved in SFML?

[sknnywhiteman]

Maybe you don't need to use OpenGL for the task you try to achieve.

I probably don't NEED to use OpenGL, but I'm doing it for a learning experience, mostly.

A word of warning: Using VBOs with SFML is associated with many many pitfalls. Do not expect to get it working until after a very long time and numerous sessions of reading through SFML source.

I've gotten it to work pretty well. I of course haven't gotten really far in-depth, but I've has success with it without any problems, once I learned how to use them.

I probably don't NEED to use VBOs, but I'm just creating a 2D tilemap game, rendering chunks a lot faster than before, with close to 2000 vertices per-chunk. before VBOs, I was just using the simple "glBegin(GL_QUADS);", which I have read from all over the internet that it's a big no-no, and that the most standard way of rendering after OpenGL core 3 is VBOs. So, I'm just doing this as a learning experience so I can fully grasp VBOs and maybe do something much more worth while in the future.

Thanks everyone for your help!