Re: [pygame] is fast opengl a possibility in pygame?

[Kris Schnee <kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Sami Hangaslammi wrote:
> On 8/24/05, Drewcore <drewsph@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > is creating a playable game (speed-wise) a possibility with
> > pygame and pyopengl?
>
> Absolutely. It's just that function calls have such a high overhead in
> Python, that you have to minimize the frequency and number of OpenGL
> calls you do from your code. This is pretty easily achieved by liberal
> use of opengl display lists and vertex/color/texture-arrays. With
> display lists, you can render a complex scene with a single function
> call (glCallList), so the overhead of Python stays minimal.

I've played with display lists and had trouble with them. It seems that 
any variables the list descriptions use are fixed at that time, so that 
if a list uses "player.position.x" and it changes, the position to which 
the player is drawn doesn't change.

I've got cube-drawing code that builds a 3D landscape out of 
variable-height pillars, at some distance from the camera, with some 
tilt. This is done by translating "into" the screen, then tilting, then 
drawing relative to that axis. If I try to spin the landscape, nothing 
seems to happen if I'm using lists. What am I missing about 
"vertex/color/texture-arrays?" To the extent that I got lists working, 
they didn't seem to improve FPS by more than 1-2 anyway, when I expected 
massive gains.

Lists would probably help a lot if I had them working well; my landscape 
demo runs at 193 FPS with nothing drawn, 28 FPS with just a few 
"widgets," and 13 FPS with widgets and cubes.

Kris