This post is a brief tutorial on how to use display lists in OpenGL. An working and self-contained example is given below using LWJGL.
Display lists are an essential feature of OpenGL to improve the rendering performance of your application. You can think of them as kind of a macro for OpenGL commands that you name, record and call at some point in your game. More specifically, you assign an integer handle to a sequence of OpenGL commands and call the commands identified by that handle when you need them.

This blog post explains a common and versatile approach to OpenGL picking called “ray picking”. A code example is given below.

Picking is the process of finding objects in you scene based on user input. Most commonly, you want to determine what object a user has clicked with his mouse. In this case the 2D mouse coordinates serve as a reference on the view port to identify the projected objected that has been clicked. A similar scenario is a first person shooter, where the gun serves as the picking pointer, however in world space coordinates. If you shoot your gun, the trajectory of the bullet is traced through your scene and collisions are detected.

This post contains the LWJGL base class that I use throughout the tutorials and examples. It basically sets up LWJGL and OpenGL which I otherwise would have to do over and over again in the individual examples. In addition, this makes the code in the tutorials and examples more readable by focusing on the important things.

This getting started-tutorial is intended for JOGL users that are mere beginners. It helps to setup a recent JOGL installation in Eclipse on Windows. There is a video-walk-through further down the post, in case you dont feel like reading.

You are right in this page if you are on the quest for one of the following:

• recent JOGL binary distribution download
• precompiled Windows Java OpenGL bindings
• you just can not find the place where to download JOGL