at the moment i am drawing a quad and placing the texture i want on it. but i was wondering can you just display the bitmap on the screen without using textures. if so how is this done. Anyone question is if you wanted to display a ball using a bitmap how do you get rid of the bits of the bitmap that arent the ball as the bitmap will be square in shape. If this can be done how is it. Hopefully these question make sence. i am a newbie to opengl

Check out the masking tutorial at nehe this will explain alot. And drawing bitmaps with opengl not using vertices (so triangles, quads or polygons in case of a bitmap) isn''t possible (at least not of my knowledge).

Let me get this straight - you want to get rid of texture data and still be able to display textures (or asj you put it, bitmaps, which are, in OpenGL, the same as textures)?

Or it could be I misunderstood you - could you explain in a little more detail what you''re trying to do?

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