Question

I want to render a scene in OpenGL ES, but I have a problem.

Because there is no immediate mode in ES, and simulating immediate mode with single-polygon buffers is slow, I can’t just switch textures and skip invisible polygons, so I have to group my polygons.

Here are characteristics of different polygons:

• Diffuse texture (mipmapped, lots of them).
• Lightmap texture (packed, up to 64 textures).
• Visibility.

At first I thought to group the polygons only by visibility area, but I couldn’t find a way to use texture index arrays.

So, how do I properly make buffers of polygons to render?

Answer 1

I will make visibility groups with texture subgroups. Quake uses 64 128×128 lightmaps, I’m going to replace them with a single 1024×1024 lightmap, since modern hardware supports textures of such size.