Keeping Track of Position OpenGL

Question

I have a sphere in my 3D world located at the origin. I have models orbiting it and I need to keep track of each models' position (x, y, x coordinates) as well as update their bounding boxes for collision detection. I have calls to glRotate() and glTranslate() but I'm not sure how to keep track of this. Should I create a position matrix and apply rotations and translations to it? Any help on that would be great!

Also if there is a better way to do this I am open to anything.

Answer 1

Sounds like you're using very out dated OpenGL code. You should look into modern techniques, I wouldn't waste much more time learning/using the dated code you're using now.

Beyond that, there are lots of ways to organize your world and the objects you store in it. The very basic example is to just have a class that represents an object in your world:

public class DrawableObject {
   Vector3f position;
   Vector3f rotation;
   Model model;
   BoundingBox bounds;
}

Then create your objects using these classes. When you're updating the position of the orbiting objects, update the DrawableObject instance that represents them. Then when you're drawing the objects, use the position and rotation stored in the DrawableObject instance.

Basically, you don't want to send the updates to the graphics card and not have them stored anywhere on the CPU side. You want to update something locally and then use that data to update the data on the graphics card.

Eventually you could move on to something more complex like an entity component system. But for now, I'd stick with learning modern OpenGL and keeping track of the objects in your world in a more organized way.