Re: [PyOpenGL-Users] PyOpenGL Deprecation & New Methods

[Greg E. <gre...@ca...>]

Gijs wrote:
> I've never found a good replacement for 
> display lists. Nor do I understand why they are deprecated at all.

This worries me, too. My guess is they are reasoning that there
is no performance advantage in using display lists if you use
vertex arrays and/or VBOs instead of glVertex calls.

This might possibly be true, *if* you're programming in C. But
it's not true at all in Python where function calls are expensive.
A display list can wrap up a sequence of just about any kind of
call, including lighting, texture, matrix changes, etc., into
something that can be fired off using just one Python call,
and that can give you a huge speed advantage.

I'm hoping that something akin to display lists will continue
to be available, maybe in glu or another library, if they are
dropped from the core of GL.

Personally I'm ignoring GL 3.0 for now and hoping it's just
a bad dream that will go away. As long as 2.x still works,
I'll continue to use it. If it ever stops working, and there
isn't a compatibility library available already, I'll write
one myself to cover the things I don't want to do without.

-- 
Greg