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You're reading from  C++ Game Animation Programming - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inDec 2023
Reading LevelN/a
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781803246529
Edition2nd Edition
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Authors (2):
Michael Dunsky
Michael Dunsky
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Michael Dunsky

Michael Dunsky is an educated electronics technician, game developer, and console porting programmer with more than 20 years of programming experience. He started at the age of 14 with BASIC, adding on his way Assembly language, C, C++, Java, Python, VHDL, OpenGL, GLSL, and Vulkan to his portfolio. During his career, he also gained extensive knowledge in virtual machines, server operation, infrastructure automation, and other DevOps topics. Michael holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the FernUniversität in Hagen, focused on computer graphics, parallel programming and software systems.
Read more about Michael Dunsky

Gabor Szauer
Gabor Szauer
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Gabor Szauer

Gabor Szauer has been making games since 2010. He graduated from Full Sail University in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in game development. Gabor maintains an active Twitter presence, and maintains a programming-oriented game development blog. Gabor's previously published books are Game Physics Programming Cookbook and Lua Quick Start Guide, both published by Packt.
Read more about Gabor Szauer

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Sending additional data to the GPU

The data sent from the vertex buffer has one important drawback: it changes for every vertex. If we need some sort of values to remain constant during a frame, such as a transformation matrix, we must take a different approach. Using the CPU for this has already been ruled out as it would be too expensive and time-consuming, so we will utilize the GPU for this task.

Both OpenGL and Vulkan have a special type of buffer for this use case: the uniform buffer.

Using uniform buffers to upload constant data

Uniform buffers have two important properties:

  • They are shared among all shaders on the graphics card
  • They are read-only inside the shaders

Any data, such as the aforementioned transformation matrices, needs to be uploaded only once per frame before the drawing starts. In the shader code, the data can be referenced like local variables, but in contrast to vertex positions, colors, and so on, it is the same for every vertex...

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C++ Game Animation Programming - Second Edition
Published in: Dec 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781803246529

Authors (2)

author image
Michael Dunsky

Michael Dunsky is an educated electronics technician, game developer, and console porting programmer with more than 20 years of programming experience. He started at the age of 14 with BASIC, adding on his way Assembly language, C, C++, Java, Python, VHDL, OpenGL, GLSL, and Vulkan to his portfolio. During his career, he also gained extensive knowledge in virtual machines, server operation, infrastructure automation, and other DevOps topics. Michael holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the FernUniversität in Hagen, focused on computer graphics, parallel programming and software systems.
Read more about Michael Dunsky

author image
Gabor Szauer

Gabor Szauer has been making games since 2010. He graduated from Full Sail University in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in game development. Gabor maintains an active Twitter presence, and maintains a programming-oriented game development blog. Gabor's previously published books are Game Physics Programming Cookbook and Lua Quick Start Guide, both published by Packt.
Read more about Gabor Szauer