hello, I am pretty new to openGL still, and I have been reading about display lists a lot because I heard about the performance gain (and memory issues as well). So in my simple 2D game I tried using Display Lists to do things such as tile buildings, and other background word. The performance gain was very noticable in my FPS count, but I have a few things I would like to ask. I noticed that my animated background was no longer animated due to the list being created once and never changing. How would I get around this?? Is a display list a good option for, say, tiling a building that WILL be tested against for things like collision detection and change if it is hit with a weapon? Or is a display list even a good idea for tiling a sky where the star sprites change every now and then? Or do I have to stick with the exact list I created in the beginning?

Display lists cannot change once created. This doesn't stop you from creating multiple displys list for each changeable object though, or from setting the changing aspects outside of the display list.

For instance, if you don't call glColor inside the display list, it will use whatver you set it to before calling it.

Check the spec for a full list of things which CANT be changed - generally things like glVertpointer etc are evaluated on list creation.