Re: Newbie Q: Is it possible to draw functional "Cocoa Controls" in an OpenGL context?

FROM : Daniel Steward
DATE : Thu Feb 15 00:21:59 2007

OK - now I'm curious.  Not having used NSOpenGLView myself I'm just 
throwing things out.  How would it work to build a composite subclass 
of NSView which includes an NSOpenGLView as a subview along with 
buttons above it.  Creating a separate window seems like a hard way 
to do this because it seems like you would have to write some sort of 
glue (literally) code to tie the two together spatially.

I suppose the other question is why can't other things draw on top of 
the OpenGL view?  Is there something about the glContext that makes 
this a problem?  I could see where maybe if the glContext renders 
asynchronously it could draw over buttons that were on top.


On Feb 14, 2007, at Wednesday4:00 PM, Scott Anguish wrote:

>
> On Feb 14, 2007, at 5:52 PM, Daniel Steward wrote:
>

>> NSOpenGLView doesn't allow subviews but you could certainly put an 
>> NSView on top of your OpenGL view and put buttons in there.  You 
>> could subclass that view to pass mouse clicks that weren't handled 
>> by buttons in the top view down to the OpenGL view.

>
>
>     We recommend against overlaying views like this in the documentation.
>
>     Right now the best solution is using an invisible floating window 
> with the controls that overlaps the OpenGL window.  I think there 
> is an example of this on developer.apple.com
>
>