fat points and lines?

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jwwalker
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fat points and lines?

Post by jwwalker »

Is it possible to draw points as more than single pixels? I see that there is a setPointSize method in the Material, Pass, and Technique classes, but I also found a post from 2017 saying that point rendering is not available in Ogre 2. And I'd prefer to be able to stick to HLMS.

I'm also wondering if there is any way to do something like OpenGL's glLineWidth. Of course I could use a triangle mesh to build a prism or cylinder with some thickness, but I'd like to have a constant thickness in screen space even if the ends of the line are at different distances from the camera.
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dark_sylinc
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Re: fat points and lines?

Post by dark_sylinc »

Point & Line size was never consistently* supported by vendors (unless you're specifically targeting one API and sticking to Quadros) which is why we didn't bother with that functionality.

* By consistent I don't just mean to have support at all, but also to support a width other than 1, and that a size other than 1 actually stays the same between computers.

There are ways to emulate this with shaders (i.e. point size with vertex-buffer-less sprites; line size with discard tricks) but there was not enough interest in these features.