Question

I want to make an opengl application that shows some 3d graphics and a command-line. I would like to make them separate threads, because they both are heavy processes. I thought that I could approach this with 2 different viewports, but I would like to know how to handle the threads in opengl.

According to what I’ve been reading, Opengl is asynchronous, and calling its functions from different threads can be very problematic. Is there a way that I could use to approach this problem? Ideally, I would like to draw the command line on top of the 3d graphics with some transparecy effect… (this is impossible with viewports I guess)

Is important that the solution is portable.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Its possible you can achieve what you want to do using Overlays.
Overlays are a somewhat dated feature but it should still be supported in most setups. Basically an overlay is a separate GL Context which is rendered in the same window as another layer, drawing on top of whatever was drawn on the windows with its original context.
You can read about it here.