i have looked through the code and saw some comments that experimental glLists have been added has that become stable? Because i did not find where that is in the source code. I am doing lots of static space ships and glLists could add performance over vertex arrays … thanks in advance!
You mean display lists? These were invented back in the days of the SGI. Back then, proper use of display lists was hugely important to optimize rendering performance.
Nowadays, very few graphics cards give an actual performance boost from the use of display lists. It’s just too much work for graphics card manufacturers to support them properly in the graphics driver, especially now that vertex buffers provide a much easier way for graphics drivers to perform almost the same level of optimization. In fact, although OpenGL requires drivers to support at least the semantics of display lists, some do it so poorly that they render more slowly with display lists enabled than without. (And some drivers are just so buggy that things render incorrectly when display lists are used.)
Still, Panda does support display lists. It always has. (Panda itself dates back to the days of the SGI, which is why it also supports other old concepts like triangle strips.) If you want to render using display lists, just put:
display-lists 1in your Config.prc file.
David