Executing Multiple Display Lists

OpenGL provides an efficient mechanism to execute several display lists in succession. This mechanism requires that you put the display-list indices in an array and call glCallLists(). An obvious use for such a mechanism occurs when display-list indices correspond to meaningful values. For example, if you're creating a font, each display-list index might correspond to the ASCII value of a character in that font. To have several such fonts, you would need to establish a different initial display-list index for each font. You can specify this initial index by using glListBase() before calling glCallLists().

void glListBase(GLuint base);

Specifies the offset that's added to the display-list indices in glCallLists() to obtain the final display-list indices. The default display-list base is 0. The list base has no effect on glCallList(), which executes only one display list or on glNewList().

void glCallLists(GLsizei n, GLenum type, const GLvoid *lists);

Executes n display lists. The indices of the lists to be executed are computed by adding the offset indicated by the current display-list base (specified with glListBase()) to the signed integer values in the array pointed to by lists.

The type parameter indicates the data type of the values in lists. It can be set to GL_BYTE, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, GL_SHORT, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, GL_INT, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, or GL_FLOAT, indicating that lists should be treated as an array of bytes, unsigned bytes, shorts, unsigned shorts, integers, unsigned integers, or floats, respectively. Type can also be GL_2_BYTES, GL_3_BYTES, or GL_4_BYTES, in which case sequences of 2, 3, or 4 bytes are read from lists and then shifted and added together, byte by byte, to calculate the display-list offset.