LWJGL - Pre-Loaded Display lists

[Ikaron]

Here I am again with yet another question. Can you pre-render display lists without lagging the game? Like if you get into a new region of a map, it loads the new "regions" of the world and pre-renders them in display lists, maybe in another thread? I thought of doing it in the loop in the time that is usually waited for the Display to sync to like 60 fps, but that'd require me to continue a display list. Is there a call for that, like GL11.glLoadList(listid); or something similar? Thanks in advance.

[sproingie]

Map data isn't something you should conflate with visual data.  Visual representations are something you're going to update every time you move as you do visibility culling.  A display list is already stored on the driver side, that's the whole point of them (actually they may be stored there, only a VBO will guarantee it).  

Loading map data in a background thread is fine, you'd just better understand multithreading first, because doing it wrong will just make your program slower and less reliable.  Multithreaded rendering , with different threads all doing graphical work, is a seriously advanced topic, with very finicky requirements per gpu/driver-version/OS combination.  At this point, you'd be better off to just forget about multithreaded rendering entirely.

[theagentd]

Here I am again with yet another question. Can you pre-render display lists without lagging the game? Like if you get into a new region of a map, it loads the new "regions" of the world and pre-renders them in display lists, maybe in another thread?

You can't render from multiple threads, even into display lists. DirectX 11 can do that, but it's slower than just using a single thread due to drivers (on both vendors).

I wouldn't worry much about performance in your case. Just make the chunks small enough, and there won't even be a dent in the FPS when a new chunk is loaded. Try to aim for 16x16 chunks.

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[Ikaron]

I wouldn't worry much about performance in your case. Just make the chunks small enough, and there won't even be a dent in the FPS when a new chunk is loaded. Try to aim for 16x16 chunks.

Thanks for your answer! Well, making the chunks small enough does work for this project, since I'm using a heightmap, but for my 3D-Cube-World, it lags the game down once in a while. What I'll try now is doing the loading in the free time between the render loop and the next execution of it.