Coder's Hang-out

[MegaVolt]

A few oddities about glut, and why it sucks in some cases.
The glutTimerFunc does not work at consistent speeds on a variable clock freqeuncy processor. A friend of mine found this out when he experienced random speeds with a constant delay. Which is not a good thing, for sure.

I don't mind that as long as I don't use it in actual real time animations, wich
I know I should if I plan to get my programs CPU friendly. But this error
may be really troubling, that's for sure...

Callbacks are slow because they allow for event-controlled programs. If you'd simply use an update loop every 15 milliseconds or so, you could still do the same, but event-controlling gives instantenous response, not just almost-instantenous. And it's easier to use.

Well reading some game programming tutorials there is always mentioned
that Keyboard callbacks are a big pain in the ass for game speed but
sometimes keyboard buffer fails too elspecially if you for example press
'a' then press 'shift' and then release 'a'. the result will be that
glutKeyboardFunc inform that 'a' key was pressed but it wasn't released
ever. That needed a little modification which I've made by releasing both
keys at glutKeyboardUpFunc.

BTW, you can change those callback functions during runtime as well, so that's an easy way of handling totally different types of input/display. (Like the game itself, and its menu system). Handy.

Yeah I know and I used those in my program cause global disable of
callbacks didn't work for some strange reason on my PC...