Re: [PyOpenGL-Users] Fastest way to draw lots of points

[Derakon <de...@gm...>]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Ian Mallett <geo...@gm...> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Chris Barker <chr...@no...>
> wrote:
>>
>> Display lists probably wont' help as you would still need to build up
>> the list -- it's also old-style and practically deprecated approach.
>
> You have to build the VBO too, but yes, display lists are deprecated.
>
> As far as dynamic stars, yes, the idea is to use either a display list or a
> VBO and either transform or use a vertex program to move your stars. For
> starfields, I personally have gotten compelling results by simply making
> several static starfields of different sizes and then scrolling them with
> glTranslatef at different rates. This gives a nice parallax effect, and is
> essentially just as fast as drawing the stars completely static.

It occurs to me that you could probably rig up a procedural texture
that would simulate a starfield for you. Then you could just use a set
of textured quads to do your parallax scrolling starfield. I'm not an
OpenGL expert though; would anyone more experienced have a sense of
how this would compare speedwise to the VBO approach? The advantages
to a procedural texture would be that there'd be no repetition to the
field, and that of course you'd never have to send more data over to
the card, except for the parameters to the shader used to generate the
texture.

-Chris