How do I render thick 2D lines as polygons?

Question

I have a path made up of a list of 2D points. I want to turn these into a strip of triangles in order to render a textured line with a specified thickness (and other such th

Answer 1

I think I'd reach for a tessellation algorithm. It's true that in most case where these are used the aim is to reduce the number of vertexes to optimise rendering, but in your case you could parameterise to retain all the detail - and the possibility of optimising may come in useful.

There are numerous tessellation algorithms and code around on the web - I wrapped up a pure C on in a DLL a few years back for use with a Delphi landscape renderer, and they are not an uncommon subject for advanced graphics coding tutorials and the like.