Using polygon stippling to draw 8x8 matrix for Conway's Life Game

Hi,

I’m new to OpenGL, still fresh from console programming in C. And I need to make yet another version of Conway’s Game of Life.

I thought it would be a good idea to move on up to a graphic enviroment instead of “drawing” with text in the console, so I naturally thought of OpenGL (and GLUT).

At first I thought I’d draw lots of squares and turn them black or white to represent birth and death, but as I went on reading the Red Book I got to stippling and thought that it might be easier to just change the mask on a polygon. But now I’ve realize that the mask fits in a polygon many times so changing it doesn’t really give me the matrix effect that I need.

Is there a way to make the mask cover the whole width and height of a polygon?

Am I approaching this problem incorrectly? Any suggestions are more than welcome.

Thanks in advance,
biterman.

Stippling is not that right feature for that.
There are more elegant solutions using the stencil buffer or textures.

Google for “Game of Life OpenGL Stencil”!

For a simple one:
http://www.mmrc.iss.ac.cn/~mli/RedBook/20341.html

An advanced one (Game of Life on that page):
http://download.nvidia.com/developer/SDK/Individual_Samples/samples.html