Question

In a voxel game I’m making, I’m using VBO’s for rendering the world. I’ use somthing like this to send the vertices to the GPU:

    FloatBuffer vertexData = BufferUtils.createFloatBuffer(..?);

    float[] vertices = new float[..?];

    //vertex calculations go here

    vertexData.put(vertices);
    vertexData.flip();

    //send the vertices
    int vboVertexHandle = glGenBuffers();
    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vboVertexHandle);
    glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexData, GL_STATIC_DRAW);
    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0);

However, the vertices are calculated dynamically, and there is no way to know how many I will be rendering beforehand. So I don’t know how much space to allocate to the FloatBuffer and to the array.

I thought using ArrayList’s but it seems slow and unefficient. Is there any way I can make an array or a FloatBuffer without specifying a size? Or sending the data to the GPU as the vertices are calculated, instead of sending them all in the end?

Answer 1

Is there any way I can make an array or a FloatBuffer without specifying a size?

Why not just use an ArrayList to generate your data, copy the vertices into a FloatBuffer, and then use that?