A window is necessary for most things in lumina.

This is always the first step when creating an application.

The class Window represents a window. Before we can open the window we need to configure some aspects. One important thing is to give a OpenGL version hint. Without this hint OpenGL doesn't know which version to use. It's called "hint" for a reason: The implementation can ignore the hint and use another version. Most of the time OpenGL tries to match the hint as best as possible. If we use a version that is too old, we may not have all features we need. If we use a version that is too new, it can happen that our hardware does not support all features of the requested version and the context creation will fail. Currently lumina uses just OpenGL 3.3 features. So we go with 3.3 for now.

Our first code looks like this:

Window win("My first application");
win.setVersionHint(3, 3);
win.resize(Vec2i(600, 400));

We have specified a version hint, window size and title. Now we are ready to open the window:

win.open()

The next step is to obtain the render context from our window. OpenGL needs a render context in order to do anything. Therefore we cannot use most of the OpenGL classes until we have context. Obtaining the context is easy, but we also need to create the context:

auto& renderContext = win.getRenderContext();

renderContext.create();

Our render context is ready now. But to use it, we have to prime it. In most cases we only have one render context and all of the other application uses this context. So it's clever to prime the context just once and pass a function to prime() that does everything else in the application. Lets call that function "runGame".

renderContext.prime(runGame);

With this basic setup we can move on to actually do something. Maybe continue with Create a VertexSeq ?

See Also: RenderContext; Window