I'm currently doing some research for writing a simple 2D bomberman game. Although the game is 2D, I want to use 3D acceleration by using billboards and a fixed camera so it 'looks' 2D. The 3D acceleration might be overkill for a simple bomberman game, but it's a good learning point for future (more advanced) 2D or 3D games.

The bomberman field will be always be the same size (in tiles), no mather what the resolution is. So I want all the images, e.g. sprites, to scale so it fills the screen. On a higher resolution you get bigger images. This is where vector graphics come in handy.

I was thinking about prerendering the vector graphics to a raster image for the current resolution. When the user changes the resolution, the engine should prerender again with a different size. This way I can load the sprites into the texture memory of the graphics card and this would speed up the billboard rendering (I think?).

I might be overseeing something important here, so therefor my question what the best approach to Vector graphics rendering is?

Thanks in advance.

That's a reasonable approach.

These days you can use the fragment shader to render some vector graphics in real time, which might be fun, but certainly isn't necessary.

Thank you for the fragment shader suggestion. I quickly searched and found a nice article with a small code example.

I'll look into it when I get home.

It sounds to me like you haven't done OpenGL before, so I would avoid programming the shaders. It's a bit more of an advanced topic.

I messed arround a bit with OpenGL before, but never came close to using shaders. I'm even new to Cocoa/Objective C (coming from Delphi/Win32). But you're right, shaders seem a bit too advanced for now.

I decided to go with my initial idea and prerender the vector graphics. It seems like I can use PDF (or EPS) as vector format and let Cocoa do all the prerendering, which really saves time (opposed to writing my own vector renderer). Though I might be misreading the text.

I have the book 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' coming in this evening, so I'll start learning Cocoa/Objective C first.

Thank you all for the suggestions/comments.

Letting Cocoa render PDFs to NSImage, and then upload them to GL is probably a great way to do this. Let Quartz to the hard work for you, plus you can use established graphics programs like illustrator to make your graphics.