Obviously I am a newbie to OpenGL. I have dreams of becoming a game programmer ( taken VB and C++ ). But, I am unaware of what OpenGL is.
Too big of a question to answer. There’s tones of info on this site to surf through…start here: http://www.opengl.org/users/about/index.html
Originally posted by jyther29:
Obviously I am a newbie to OpenGL. I have dreams of becoming a game programmer ( taken VB and C++ ). But, I am unaware of what OpenGL is.
Short answer: It’s a API (Application Programming Interface) for 3d. You simply call a number of predefined functions to get the results on the screen.
I suggest have a look at these tutorials:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/opengl.asp
They start from the setting of a window, and on, and on… well explained…
Unfortunately I discovered them too late 
Fuzz
As a beginer, think of it as a set of functions that lets you draw lines points and polygons on the screen, set the colors of these objects, put “lights” in the scene so the colors of the objects look different when they are oriented in different ways with respect to the lights. there are functions that let you add fog to the screen, you can make objects transparent. you can make an object out of polygons and load picture files like bitmaps to put over the surfaces of the wireframe.
these are some of the things openGL lets you do and much much more.
if you want to program games then you want to learn either OpenGL or Direct3D (part of DirectX) which sucks. www.msdn.microsoft.com/directx so… you want to learn OpenGL.
oh and you can animate all that stuff too of course.
To add, I would also say that it’s a low-level api, it only knows about simple primitives like triangles, points, etc, yet is very, very powerfull, and is the easiest and most documented (and best, and …) API in it’s class to start with I think.
Yeah, and it is portable. if you use glut for example, you can compile your program with KDevelop, VC++ and so on (if you don’t use other compiler-specific things like namespaces or so…)
And: it’s easy to read. have you ever seen directx-sourcecode? THAT’S CRYPTIC!
Bastian