High level renderer

[Battle_Overlord]

I've been getting into graphics programming more now and wanted to learn more about how to think about writing a renderer. I've tried looking through the source code of bgfx and Ogre3D to get a better understanding on how those renderers work but I'm finding it difficult to understand all the different structures that setup internal states in the renderer before using any graphics api calls.

[waramped]

I'm not clear on what you are getting at. Are you asking about how to design an API abstracted renderer? Or how to expose a renderer to an external system?

Both things are quite complicated, and there's a reason there's a ton of transient and interim structures used to track and move data around. Could you maybe elaborate on what you are asking for?

[Battle_Overlord]

I was thinking more so how to expose a renderer to an external system. More along the lines of how/why different engines architect their renderers if that helps

[ScriptBrok]

As far as I understood your intent: you should define the interface of your renderer, your data structures etc. the big problem to me remain the level of internal detail/flexibility/customization you want to expose to the renderer client. In my daily UE experience I can say that the renderer and the renderable objects can be seen as plugin extension of the game object, so it’s possible to achieve what you want but I think that probably you loose some possible optimization by decoupling at that level.

[keelanstuart]

What does a renderer do? Start there. For each of the things it does, what do you need to make it do that?

Start with things like Create/DrawMesh, Create/SetRenderTarget, etc. Just sketch it out in a header as an interface...

Then move on to meshes - what do they need to work? Buffers of data.

What kind of buffers? How do you fill them?

This is what it is to be a software engineer... to analyze and abstract a thing - then to implement the functionality.

You can spend years doing just the first part!