Glblit

GL_blit: an exhaustive example about blitting sprites with OpenGL
Copyright (C) 2005 Angelo "Encelo" Theodorou

Info
----
This is testbed code for considering the inclusion of an OpenGL blitter inside
the game 
Mars: Land of No Mercy (http://mars.sourceforge.net).
It has support for colorkey (working the same as with SDL_Surface), for further
transformations (rotate and scale) 
and it checks for maximum texture size.

The program renders a quad with a texture in ortographic view, this is often
much better than blitting pixels 
directly with glDrawPixels() because the majority of non professional cards do
not have hardware support for pixels 
manipulation functions.

Using textures leads to another problem, the famous NPOT (non-power-of-two)
textures, which sides measure a number of pixels that is not a precise power of
two.
The problem was solved in two different ways:
1) with the GL_ARB_texture_rectangle extension, which avoids the problem for
ever but needs hardware support and 
could rise performance issues (which are not, of course, of any importance when
we're talking of simple 2d quads ;-) )
Please note that GL_ARB_texture_non_power_two is really not very much supported
at the time of writing.
2) drawing NPOT surfaces inside POT textures, which works everywhere, is always
fast but adds some lines of code.
I tried to keep the Sprite structure as smaller as possible, but you can make it
contain more informations, in order to do less checks and to enhance the speed
(but again I think that a couple of log() and pow() inside the blitting function
don't afflict it too much).

Consider the hypnotic background triangles as a special gift and as a proof that
we're effectively inside an 
OpenGL render context. :)

Compiling
---------
To compile use the included Makefile which takes care for both the examples.
It has to be tailored to each one's needs, you would probably have to change
include dirs.
If your compiler fails, complaining for the lack of the
GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_DEFINE, check the code for a comment with the 
effective value of it.


Notes
-----
The origin of the coordinates system is the upper left corner of the screen,
like SDL. It makes more sense with 2d graphics.

Together with the source, in addition to the Mars logo, there are two little png
images rendered by me with Blender, you can use them in the program to make your
tests.
The first, "sphere.png", is 64x64 pixels and is, of course, POT, while the
other, "stick.png", is a NPOT 276x54 image.

Just like glxgears, each 5 seconds you will see framerate information printed to
stdout.

The program has been tested on a PowerPC architecture system therefore there
shouldn't be any endianess related quirks.

Extras
------

Here is the first version of the blitter function, as you read in the comments,
you can use it as is if you don't need 
some adavanced functionalities.

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/* The old and simpler blitter, it's ok if you don't need further sprite
transformations or NPOT textures */
void BlitSprite(struct Sprite *sprite)
{
    glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
    glEnable(GL_BLEND);

    glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, sprite->texnum);
    glBegin(GL_QUADS);
        glColor3f(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
        glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f);
            glVertex2d(sprite->x, sprite->y);
        glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f);
            glVertex2d(sprite->x + sprite->w, sprite->y);
        glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f);
            glVertex2d(sprite->x + sprite->w, sprite->y + sprite->h);
        glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f);
            glVertex2d(sprite->x, sprite->y + sprite->h);
    glEnd();

    glDisable(GL_BLEND);
}
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