Display Lists - good?

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3 comments, last by Martee 23 years ago
Ok, so I am starting to write a RTS-type engine in OpenGL. I am using display lists to draw the units. My question is, is this a good idea, or is there some better/faster way I should consider? ~~~~~~~~~~ Martee http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill
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You might want to look at vertex arrays, but display lists are pretty good by themselves.

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I''ll check out vertex arrays ... but I''m thinking they might be a few notches above my current OpenGL skill level .

~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill
ReactOS - an Open-source operating system compatible with Windows NT apps and drivers
I am not really good at OGL programming, but i was under the impression that a render list is good when you are drawing a static object like terrain or like a tree model that is not animated. you build the list once and simply call it every frame. But if you are gonna have annimated characters you have to update the render list every frame (again i might be completely wrong), which i tried once and it is very very very slow. So i would suggest using render lists only for objects that are not animated.
Yes, another bad thing about display lists is that they need video memory. Because of that do I think that many bigger apps tries to avoid them. The standard vertex arrays is good and flexible but slower than display lists. The fastest for many cards is to use some kind of extended vertex arrays like VAR/fence for geforce cards.

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