I've been having problems and, after spending a week trying out all kinds of solutions and tearing my hair out, I've come here to see whether anybody could help me.
I'm working on a 3D browser plugin for the Mac (I have one that works on Windows). The only fully-hardware accelerated way to do this is to use a CAOpenGLLayer (or something that inherits from that). If a NSWindow is created and you attach the layer to that window's NSView then everything works correctly. But, for some reason, I can only get a specific number of frames (16) to render when passing the layer into the browser.
Cocoa calls my layer's drawInCGLContext for the first 16 frames. Then, for some unknown reason, it stops calling it. 16 seems like a very specific - and programmatic - number of frames and so I wondered whether anybody had any insight into why drawInCGLContext would not be called after 16 frames?
I'm reasonably sure it's not because I pass the layer into the browser - I've created a very minimal example plugin that renders a rotating quad using CAOpenGLLayer and that actually works. But the full plugin is a lot more complicated than that and I just don't know where to look anymore. I just don't know why drawInCGLContext stops being called. I've tried forcing it using CATransaction, it definitely gets sent the setNeedsDisplay message - but drawInCGLContext is never called. OpenGL doesn't report any errors either (I'm currently checking the results of all OpenGL calls). I'm confused! Help?
So, for anybody else who has this problem in future: You're trying to draw using the OpenGL context outside of the drawInCGLContext. There was a bug in the code where nearly all the drawing was happening from the correct place (drawInCGLContext) but one code path led to it rendering outside of there.
No errors are raised nor does glGetError return any problems. It just stops rendering. So if this happens to you - you're almost certainly making the same mistake I made!