Can't use the hardware scissor any more, should I use the stencil buffer or manually clip sprites?
- by Alex Ames
I wrote a simple UI system for my game. There is a clip flag on my widgets that you can use to tell a widget to clip any children that try to draw outside their parent's box (for scrollboxes for example). The clip flag uses glScissor, which is fed an axis aligned rectangle. I just added arbitrary rotation and transformations to my widgets, so I can rotate or scale them however I want. Unfortunately, this breaks the scissor that I was using as now my clip rectangle might not be axis aligned.
There are two ways I can think of to fix this: either by using the stencil buffer to define the drawable area, or by having a wrapper function around my sprite drawing function that will adjust the vertices and texture coords of the sprites being drawn based on the clipper on the top of a clipper stack. Of course, there may also be other options I can't think of (something fancy with shaders possibly?). I'm not sure which way to go at the moment.
Changing the implementation of my scissor functions to use the stencil buffer probably requires the smallest change, but I'm not sure how much overhead that has compared to the coordinate adjusting or if the performance difference is even worth considering.
