lesson 10 introduces a great concept for program design and creation - the storage of your worlds in an external file which is loaded into the program. I've been wondering if there is any way i can export or copy a 3d model created in, say 3DS Max, into a list of vertecies which i can then load into my openGL code? this would save alot of time, especially when creating large or complex scenes, and there simply must be a way of doing it which doesn't involve me manually copying the coordinates of every vertex in the model? anyone have any ideas? thanks in advance, Mal'

Write a program to convert something, like an OBJ format file to whatever world format you are using. I'm assuming you are new to coding and that you are using C++. It will be good practice, as you'll probably be writing a lot of file parsers in the future if you're doing game coding work. If you can understand the nehe lesson 10, world format, then OBJ should also be simple. Here is some info about the format: http://www.eg-models.de/formats/Format_Obj.html
Just export from 3DS Max, GMax, Milkshape, Blender, or whatever into OBJ format. Hope that helps.

Of cause there is, in fact the method in lesson 10 is far from the best one.
Well anyway you could either continue on to lesson 31 where you learn how to load a milkshape model, or you could go to http://www.wotsit.org/ and look up the .obj format, it should be pretty simple to load and most 3d softwares can export to it.