Question

I’m working on a multiplayer game and will be displaying other players near the player. At most 16 players could be near the gamer however there could also be 0. What I’m thinking of doing is setting up 16 empty VBOs so they’re ready to load with character’s position when the client receives them. Is it valid to create empty VBOs? If not how should I go about rendering data that may or may not be there depending on what the server is sending the client?

Answer 1

Your question confuses me. Why use a VBO to store position? VBO can just have vertices of whatever you’re drawing, and you can move the position based on the modelMatrix at time of drawing.

Simple pseudocode:

LoadVBO(player_model);

for(int i=0;i<16;i++){
  if(player[i].visible) {
    modelMatrix = player[i].position;
    glUniform(modelMatrix);
    DrawVBO(player_model);
  }
}

If this is not sufficient, please give more information. Why try to draw an empty vbo, instead of just setting a flag that skips the draw call?