ModernGL Types

Before throwing you into doing shaders we’ll go through some of the most important types/objects in ModernGL.

• Buffer is an OpenGL buffer we can for example write vertex data into. This data will reside in graphics memory.

• Program is a shader program. We can feed it GLSL source code as strings to set up our shader program

• VertexArray is a light object responsible for communication between Buffer and Program so it can understand how to access the provided buffers and do the rendering call. These objects are currently immutable but are cheap to make.

• Texture, TextureArray, Texture3D and TextureCube represents the different texture types. Texture is a 2d texture and is most commonly used.

• Framebuffer is an offscreen render target. It supports different attachments types such as a Texture and a depth texture/buffer.

All of the objects above can only be created from a Context object:

• Context.buffer()

• Context.program()

• Context.vertex_array()

• Context.texture()

• Context.texture_array()

• Context.texture3d()

• Context.texture_cube()

• Context.framebuffer()

The ModernGL types cannot be extended as in; you cannot subclass them. Extending them must be done through substitution and not inheritance. This is related to performance. Most objects have an extra property that can contain any python object.