loading screens

I am trying to make a decent loading screen for my app but all I can do is write text. I am trying to create a progress bar but it seams like I cant render anything but text. I am using windows code for my windowing if that helps. I cant even draw and arbitrary vertex anywhere. I am drawing the loading screen in an init function not in the main draw obviously. Hopefully this makes some since. Basically I just want to know a good way of making a loading screen. thanks

Probably a textured quad using glOrtho, and any text could be put just in front of it. Only problem with glTexImage is it requires width and height be a power of 2, though it does not have to be square. You could also try gluBuildMipmap which does not require power of 2, but I’ve never used it.

I think not bad idea to put your loading code into another thread, so you’ll be able easily show some animations while load your massive data and perform some processing of it.