Opengl Game Loop Multithreading

Question

I have been messing around with OpenGL lately, and I noticed that the windows message pump is blocking whenever i attempt to resize my window, so as a result rendering is halted whenever i click on the menu bar or resize the window.

To fix this, I am looking into multithreading.

I have the following:

_beginthread(RenderEntryPoint, 0, 0);
while (!done)
{
 PeekMessage(&msg, NULL, NULL, NULL, PM_REMOVE);
 if (msg.message == WM_QUIT)
 {
 done = true;
 }
 else
 {
 TranslateMessage(&msg);
 DispatchMessage(&msg);
 }
}
void RenderEntryPoint(void *args)
{
 while (1)
 {
 //render code
 }
}

However, my scene isn't being rendered, and I'm not sure why.

Answer 1

You need to make the OpenGL rendering context current in the rendering thread, and make sure it's not current in the windowing thread. This also means that you can't call any OpenGL functions from the windowing thread.