Hello,
I am currently working on writing my own windowing toolkit. I do this just for fun and for the honor; I want to learn more about OpenGL and programming in general and I think this will be learning a lot throughout this project.
Unfortunately I ran into a little problem and I would like to ask for some help on this. I decided to use a recursive structure for the GUI components; they are nested into each other like a tree.
GUI example:
GUI as a component tree:
My problem is that I need to do some clipping in the GUI. The child of a component should never extend over the boundary box of its parent component. If I have a window and some buttons inside the buttons should not be drawn outside of the window if the window is resized to be very small.
I personally know of 2 ways of doing this clipping; scissor-test and stencil-test. I tried with scissor test and it works so far, but my problem is, that I try to store all the rendering data for all components in one big VBO, each time I want to apply a scissor test I have to make another draw call. If the component tree is very high instead of wide this would result in awful performance I guess.
I haven worked too much with stencil tests yet, but I thought these could potentially make it a little better.
So, after that wall of text, these are my questions:
- Would using stencil test be a better idea for clipping? (And why?)
- If stencil tests would be better, can you give me an advice on how to use them properly for this task?
- Is there some other way I could do this that I just dont know about?
Thank you very much for the answers, I really appreciate the help.