Getting anxious to get start the tutorial and OpenGL, i''m printing out all 275 pages of the PDF version included on his disk, taking awhile! lol part of me thinks that the ink & paper i''m using is enough to buy a book lol but this tutorial will be worth it! I have a question for all the hard cores: i do a lot of other programming besides OpenGL, stuff I use on a day to day basis, often even stuff i do often i have to refer back to in order to remember how things are done. What I wonder is this: there''s tons of functions between windows and OpenGL that are called just in creating the OpenGL window, not to mention drawing scenes & objects. When you start a new project, does it take a lot of page flipping to sort of remember how certain things are done or do you just know all the function calls for windows & GL by memory? Just going over this tutorial''s first lesson, i''m starting to question how interesting this will be commiting this to memory lol and got curious. remembering how all the functions work, the parameters, what ones go where, the types, there''s a lot! Definately more than I had origionally thought! What memory enhancing herbs do you take in doing so? LOL Anyone played Tux Racer for Linux/Windows? Written in OpenGL guys! Very cool game! Not as snazzy, but graphicaly comperable to SSX Tricky! Later! SigSeg

Reference books and on-and-off-line help systems are there for a reason. Cut''n''paste usually works quite well (although don''t rely on that, you''d better know what the code does before c''n''p). You''re better off memorizing data structures and algorithms than window set up code. Even then it''s not really necessary as long as you know where to look (i.e. google usually helps quite a bit ).

Might not work for some, but I follow the "Jump in and Swim" approach to learning. I "jump" into heavy coding, and when something goes wrong, or I''ve lost track of what my code needs to do, I "swim" around for the information I need.

Eventually after discovering all the functions available to me, I go back and design software that makes use of these functions, and through a few iterations, those functions just become a part of my vocab.

Though honestly, I''m not a huge memory bank, and I do make regular use of reference pages and books, afterall they''re there for a reason. However, I wouldn''t exactly find it feasible to print out an entire pdf file =), just so long as you know what you''re trying to do, you can simply use the search function to find the code to do it.

In reality you could basically make a computer program do anything you want, it is as if the ideas and the code that drives them is endless. So are you really going to print out the reference books to all that code too?

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Original post by SigSeg
Anyone played Tux Racer for Linux/Windows? Written in OpenGL guys! Very cool game! Not as snazzy, but graphicaly comperable to SSX Tricky!
SigSeg

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Yeah, I''ve played it. The linux version. It''s written useing SDL, which I recommend very much btw. It''ll not only keep your apps cross-platform quite easily, but it also takes a lot of the setup-code for it''s account. You should try it.