Howdy

I'm writing a program and I'd like to mess with the a screen capture of whatever if displayed on the screen when the program starts. I need to then use the grab of the screen as an OpenGL texture so I can draw on it, or put it on a polygon or whatever.

So my question is, how do I grab the screen and then make it into a texture? It's something I've done under Windows, but I can't work it out under Mac OS X, altho I'm hoping it's still possible.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Rob.

Should certainly be possible. Freedom Force (ported by Omni Group) applies an entertaining swirl effect to the desktop image when it starts up. I don't know how they did it though.

For that matter, screen capture utilities also do it. Hmmm...
[5 minutes later]
Here's a method I just came up with: programatically invoke the command line utility "screencapture", sending the image to the clipboard.
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/20...tml?page=3
Then you'd have to get it from there into a texture.

There's got to be a more direct way, though. Hopefully someone here knows the magic incantation...

If you're only interested in capturing *your* app's interface into an OpenGL texture, and if your app is Cocoa, you could use this:

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1325.html

Hmm.. I actually want to get the whole screen, but it's a start.

Just thinking without knowing here, but is there a global NSView which encompases the whole screen? That'd be handy. Or what about making a window the size of the screen thats transparent, then grabbing that? That would work under Windows, but I don't know enough about OS X to be able to say myself. What dya think?