There are three main ways I know of to draw a simple circle in OpenGL ES, as provided by the iPhone. They are all based on a simple algorithm (the VBO version is below).
void circleBufferData(GLenum target, float radius, GLsizei count, GLenum usage) {
const int segments = count - 2;
const float coefficient = 2.0f * (float) M_PI / segments;
float *vertices = new float[2 * (segments + 2)];
vertices[0] = 0;
vertices[1] = 0;
for (int i = 0; i <= segments; ++i) {
float radians = i * coefficient;
float j = radius * cosf(radians);
float k = radius * sinf(radians);
vertices[(i + 1) * 2] = j;
vertices[(i + 1) * 2 + 1] = k;
}
glBufferData(target, sizeof(float) * 2 * (segments + 2), vertices, usage);
glVertexPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, 0);
delete[] vertices;
}
The three ways that I know of to draw a simple circle are by using glDrawArray from an array of vertices held by the application; using glDrawArray from a vertex buffer; and by drawing to a texture on initialization and drawing the texture when rendering is requested. The first two methods I know fairly well (though I have not been able to get anti-aliasing to work). What code is involved for the last option (I am very new to OpenGL as a whole, so a detailed explanation would be very helpful)? Which is most efficient?