Ive begun creating a 2d space shooter and i need to set a bitmap as my background. At this point im not worried about it moving but im just wondering how i would load the bitmap into a texture on a cube the size of my 800x600x16 window (im new to openGL) so that it looks like its the background.. any tips?

If you want the edges to be exactly on the boarder of your screen, then I suggest setting up and Ortho window and then drawing it as a texture mapped quad. If you are very new to openGL though you could just display a texture mapped quad in normal space. You would just have to use trial and error to find out the coordinates. The textue won''t line up exactly on the edges of the screen, though you could get it pretty close. Also things might go past it it you are not careful to make sure they are totally in front of it.

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