Question

Just reading the DevIL manual here. Also reminded me of glGenBuffers. Why did they choose to have the user of each library generate names (pg. 6 in the DevIL manual), rather than specifying names for your own images/buffers and so on?

I thought maybe they’re trying to keep things simpler, automation-wise, for when you need to load large batches of images. But I’m not sure that’s a sensible conclusion. Probably there’s some incredibly straightforward answer that I will smack myself on the forehead for not seeing.

Answer 1

From here:

The process is as follows: first, use glGenBuffersARB to get a valid
VBO “name”. Essentially, a name is an ID number which OpenGL will
associate with your data. We want to generate a name because the same
ones won’t always be available.