Hello,

I was reading some posts across the internet and it seems the the modelview and projection matrix, along all they're modification functions, such as glTranslate, rotate, etc became deprecated and removed in the most recent openGL versions.

I'm still using opengl 3.0 version, so I don't get compilation errors using them, but seeing that they are no longer in use in current openGL versions I would like to follow that philosophy.

Since this is Computer Graphics the matrixes will still be needed, even if it's not in the openGL matrix stack. After some more reading seems that the general idea is to implement the functions by myself (or using someone elses library), and pass the matrix to my shaders.

The thing is, I don't plan to use shaders everytime I want to render something, so my question here is:
-Should I start using shaders everytime I want to render something, even though it's just making simple calculations as would be done without my shader implementation, or in these particular cases I should pass my own calculated matrixes to openGL?

I'm doing this thinking from a performance point of view.

Not using shader by itself is deprecated in OpenGL >= 3.0. So if you want to get up to date you have to move to using them.

If you want a replacement for the old gl matrices functions, you might want to look at something like glm (http://glm.g-truc.net). Its a math library focused on interacting nicely with opengl, so it might be close to the old interface. I haven't used it myself though.

Then I think I will continue using the matrix stack openGL provides, since I don't have the needs to use openGL 4.0 functionalities.

Thanks for the opinions, helped a lot!

Skeletal animation is in my plans indeed, I already wrote some modules for it and I conclued that I need to calculate a lot of matrices and pass them to my shader to positionate my vertexes, seeing from that point of view I think leaving the openGL matrix stack will be something that will come naturaly, but maybe it's best to solve that problem early, than later change a lot of code