   Opengl and Scenes
  Hello, I'm still fairly new to Opengl and need some help. I have a book on Opengl that talks about terrain and loading models but I don't understand how I would combine the two to make a world map or environment. I could manually load the models onto the terrain but that would take forever if there are many of them. Is there a way to make this easier?   
  What do you mean by "manually load the models onto the terrain"? You don't have to do anything special, you just load your terrain and models separately as before, then draw them one after each other. If you give a clearer description of your problem we'll be able to give you a more useful answer.   ;  I'm asking if there is an easier way to draw a "world" instead of drawing each model one by one on top of the terrain.Sorry I'm still new and not a pro with the lingo.   ;  nope, that's the way you do it. when you've advanced a bit (well quite a bit) you can have a look at things like instancing to speed up rendering the same model several times a frame but in general, this is how it's done. you load your meshes from files or generate them proceduraly, then you upload them to the gpu and render them each frame.   ;  What's wrong with rendering terrain and meshes separately? Don't solve problems that don't exist. ;)   ;  I think some of you are misunderstanding me and that's my bad because I used poor choice of words.I was asking if there was an easier way to draw models like buildings onto a terrain because I can imagine for big maps that would be annoying. Vexator gave me my answer though.   ;  This is how you draw stuff in simple terms:Draw one thing at a time.How can you draw a building "onto" a terrain? Did you read your own question? It doesn't even make sense. Load all your renderable elements however you wish, draw the terrain, and then draw your models/meshes/etc so that they fit well in the context of the world. What's the problem?   ;  Ok let me try to clarify again, and please keep in mind that I'm new and don't know the lingo so bear with me if I'm using the wrong words.I know how to draw terrain, I know how to draw animated models.You know how in a game there is a "scene" or a "world" with hundreds of different things like trees, signs, buildings, cars, etc.I was asking if there was a quicker way to draw these, not quicker loading wise, not quicker program speed wise, I mean instead of writing hundreds of lines of code can I just make a model of an entire environment and draw that or will it mess up collision detection. I don't see why you guys are getting irritated at me like I'm expected to know this stuff right off the bat. I'm trying to learn.;  Sorry Munro. It's hard to gauge where people are.Normally when you have a "scene" you define some way of storing or representing that scene so that your game can loop through and handle all of that content for you.You don't use individual lines of code to handle every item, but rather you create a system, with code, that handles that repetition for you.It's a slightly higher level of thinking.Rather than writing code that immediately performs the action you want, you write a system that can create & manage it. (If I am interpreting you correctly)When you mentioned loading models & using OpenGL we probably presumed you had written your own rendering engine for such things, & had a higher level of understanding.We were looking for something too complex. Couldn't see the wood through the trees :]Normally you would create a custom class to represent the model object & it's current state, & store the scene as an array/list of these items.Handling things like drawing would be a case of a section of code that looped through that list, & drew the corresponding item according to the state stored.(rather than a line of code for each)Often these scenes are loaded from another file (usually as maps/levels/scenarios).These scenes, complete with objects etc, are usually managed from editing tools.Sometimes we make our own to do this, sometimes we will use existing map editors or tools.We may not be able to help you yet because you may not fully grasp the vocabulary and concepts involved. (we can't tell you how to write a haiku before you learn japanese)Keep studying. Maybe look at some more general programming material before you delve deeply into gl.There are some other skills required for making games too :]   ;  Thanks, yea I realize that the confusion was caused by my poor choice of words but it didn't help that I wasn't treated so great. I think I understand how it works now.   