efficiency when displaying backgrounds

Hi
I have a plan view simulation, with several planes.(v simple model, ie a triangle) and a surface.

Currently i have the terrain drawn as GL_POINT’s with data from a file, all fed into a display list which is called to display the terrain data.

However this is quite slow for display.

Is there a more efficeint and quicker method of showing the terain, (terrain is quite simple, basically a 3D surface with higher points being whiter than lower points)? is using a bitmap image and displaying that quicker? or am i barking up the wrong tree?

any ideas greatly appreciated

glPoints? Yeah, that’s going to be very slow, particularly if you’re shooting for terrain without holes.

Try using triangle strips (With a lower density, I imagine…). It will take a little bit more code to get the proper vertex ordering, but shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

[This message has been edited by Chalnoth (edited 11-06-2002).]

btw the terrain models 100km square, and there are approx 250 POINT’s along each line so 250*250 POINT’s all together