3.b Attribute Offsets and Strides

Setting Strides and Offsets for Vertex Arrays and VBO

There are 2 ways to tell OpenGL in which layout the Vertices are stored:

1. GL.InterleavedArrays()
   What GL.InterleavedArrays does is enable/disable the required client states for OpenGL to interpret our passed data, the first parameter tells that we have 2 floats for Texture Coordinates (T2f), 3 floats for Normal (N3F) and 3 floats for position (V3F). The second parameter is the stride that will be jumped to find the second, third, etc. set of texcoord/normal/position values. Since our Vertices are tighly packed, no stride (zero) is correct. The last parameter should point at Indices, but we already sent them to the VBO in video memory, no need to point at them again:
   
   GL.InterleavedArrays( InterleavedArrayFormat.T2fN3fV3f, 0, null );
   
   This command has the advantage that it's very obvious to the OpenGL driver what layout of data we have supplied, and it may be possible for the driver to optimize the memory. Remember that GL.InterleavedArrays will change states, if you manually disable EnableCap.VertexArray, EnableCap.NormalArray, EnableCap.TextureCoordArray or changing GL.VertexPointer, GL.NormalPointer or GL.TexCoordPointer (after calling GL.InterleavedArrays and before calling GL.DrawElements) make sure to enable them again or you won't see anything.
2. Setting the offsets/strides manually
   For the Vertex format InterleavedArrayFormat.T2fN3fV3f, the correct pointer setup is:
   
   GL.TexCoordPointer( 2, TexCoordPointerType.Float, 8 * sizeof( float ), (IntPtr) ( 0 ) );
   GL.NormalPointer( NormalPointerType.Float, 8 * sizeof( float ), (IntPtr) ( 2 * sizeof( float ) ) );
   GL.VertexPointer( 3, VertexPointerType.Float, 8 * sizeof( float ), (IntPtr) ( 5 * sizeof( float ) ) );
   1. The first parameter is the number of components to describe that attribute. For GL.NormalPointer this is always 3 components, but is variable for Texture coordinates and Position (and Color).
   2. The second parameter is the type of the components.
   3. The third parameter is the number of bytes between Texture coordinate 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. also known as stride.
   4. The last parameter indicates the byte offset of the first appearance of the attribute, this makes perfect sense if you recall the layout of our Vertex struct.