Tracking GL references

[tilkinsc]

Something has perplexed me for quite some time. In my projects, I typically have a reference to the GL object which gets passed around to everything that requires OpenGL.

Some things I've noticed about Silk.NET GL Object:

• Contexts can be lost and will need to be rebuilt or result in a crash (gpu driver reset, gpu driver upgrades, to name a couple) and the same function pointers Silk.NET was using could be invalidated for gl functions above 1.1 on windows
• You can have a singleton which all your objects reach out to, to utilize OpenGL. This is a very verbose approach. For example, OpenGLManager.Instance.OpenGL.Clear(...) (...Instance.OpenGL ends up becoming a variable in a lot of functions, too) or lack of a singleton and just have static state, which could be yikes to implement for context loss reasons.
• You can pass GL to everything that requires OpenGL and ignore contexts being lost, and you create sooo much passing when you are creating new instances, or you could create an abstract class everything extends which automatically pulls the GL reference from some state into the class. But because you can have only one base class, this removes a layer of abstraction from your control (which should be fine for 99% of cases?)

So, let's talk. What methods have you guys been successful with?

[LeNitrous]

Game Engines like Godot or Unity just restart the game from the very beginning and recreate resources from there. They don't do any reference tracking at all.

You can emulate this by running any android game that uses Unity and send it to background. Open as many other apps as you can and that should trigger the EGL context from an Android surface to be destroyed.

[HurricanKai]

One thing I've done in the past is use the MS Extensions DI container, that way you can just re-create the entire container and that in turn restarts the game. It's also quite a nice way to pass around the various handles

[tilkinsc]

More info?

[Beyley]

Something has perplexed me for quite some time. In my projects, I typically have a reference to the GL object which gets passed around to everything that requires OpenGL.

Some things I've noticed about Silk.NET GL Object:

* Contexts can be lost and will need to be rebuilt or result in a crash (gpu driver reset, gpu driver upgrades, to name a couple) and the same function pointers Silk.NET was using could be invalidated for gl functions above 1.1 on windows

* You can have a singleton which all your objects reach out to, to utilize OpenGL. This is a very verbose approach. For example, `OpenGLManager.Instance.OpenGL.Clear(...)` (...Instance.OpenGL ends up becoming a variable in a lot of functions, too) or lack of a singleton and just have static state, which could be yikes to implement for context loss reasons.

* You can pass GL to everything that requires OpenGL and ignore contexts being lost, and you create sooo much passing when you are creating new instances, or you could create an abstract class everything extends which automatically pulls the GL reference from `some state` into the class. But because you can have only one base class, this removes a layer of abstraction from your control (which should be fine for 99% of cases?)

So, let's talk. What methods have you guys been successful with?

i just pass around a GL object, and if the context gets destroyed, oh well