I am back. After job changes, life changes and other things i can now come back and do what i started to do about 3 or 4 years ago.
Therefore this post here will require comments from experience OpenGL coders as i will address general thoughts and concerns.
I currently have some old books, some older than others and wondering if they are garbage now. I am pretty sure that the LaMothe series(OpenGL Game Programming, Data Structures, etc) is all defunct now. I have OpenGL Distilled still and the Orange Book(first release i think). I also still have a bookmark to lighthouse 3D. After some reading it looks like shader setup has changed a bit and perhaps the old way of setting up a scene in OpenGL is no longer valid/not supported(i.e. setting up initial lights, background color, etc etc).
Where can i go or where should i start back so that i can be up to date? I really don’t want to spend a ton of time on coding if that code is currently out of date or will be totally deprecated with OpenGL 3 and would rather prepare myself for that. However, i would still like to code for relatively older machines too and be able to port the projects across all major platforms(windows, linux and mac).
I guess i am just right now, looking for direction so that i can start back and turning around results pretty quickly. As a sidenote before i stopped doing openGl work shaders were just really starting to take off, so i never really got deep into shader technology, so most of this will be new to me. As i said before, i had already bought the orange book(1st release), but unsure if it is still relevant.
Short Term goals: Simple Polygons(2D and 3D), Lighting, getting familiar again with 2d/3d perspectives, texture manipulation…
Long terms goals: performance improvements(through different drawing techniques or using shaders only, etc), dynamic meshes, real time generation of objects(i.e. 64K executables) and others things of that nature.
Thanks in advance for all your input. It is glad to be back.