Hey everyone,
I currently have a version of Conway’s Game Of Life I’ve written in C. Since I have no formal training in GL or any of it’s toolkits, I was hoping someone could give me some advice. If you do not know the game of life, it’s a cellular automaton where each cell follows a set of rules to effect the cells around it. (there is more to it, but that’s about it for the sake of this question). It is basically a 2D “grid” of squares. I’ve successfully been able to rig some openGL/GLUT code together to represent each cell as a GL_QUAD.
I’ve seen some versions of this where the drawing of such GL_QUADS or anything really, it SUPER fast. Probably something to do with textures/some advanced GL feature that I am unaware of. Could someone take a look at this and tell me if it’s even possible the “optimize” the performance of the drawing? The quotes are there since I’m not really sure what is possible. I just know that I’m using the most basic drawing idioms and think there is something better out there. The more references people can give me the better; I’m just looking for a solid place to start digging into this stuff.
ps - sorry if this is a duplicate post; I don’t know any keywords to use to lead me to existing posts.
pss - I am aware of technologies such as VSYNC, etc. Basically, I’m pretty experienced with various things, just not GL.
Thanks in advance!
Link to the code - https://github.com/anthonygclark/GameOfLife/blob/master/gol.c
EDIT:
The code above and its Makefile haven’t been tested in MS Windows.