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Occassionally I hit places where I'd want to get an OpenGL framebuffer object, but where I'm not interested about opening a window of any kind.
Is it possible to create an opengl context without attaching it to a window of any kind?
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Create the Context Before you can use OpenGL, the context you created must be made current. This is done with the wglMakeCurrent function. This takes a DC and the HGLRC context. If there is already a current context, then this function will cause the old context to be replaced with the new.
An OpenGL rendering context is a port through which all OpenGL commands pass. Every thread that makes OpenGL calls must have a current rendering context. Rendering contexts link OpenGL to the Windows windowing systems. An application specifies a Windows device context when it creates a rendering context.
Yes! you can use the desktop window as the window passed to OpenGL- as long as you don't try to display anything on it ;)
Just Call GetDesktopWindow and pass the result as an argument when creating new OpenGL window.
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http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Creating_an_OpenGL_Context
According to this Web page, WGL_ARB_create_context can be used to create a context without a window. I have not actually tried it myself. I used freeGLUT to create the context and then rendered off-screen to a framebuffer+renderbuffer. I exit the program without ever calling glutMainLoop. It is klugy, but it works for my purposes.
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