Thanks for the support creez. Today was spent researching example code online. I have a vision for what I want to do but none of the examples are really helping me achieve my goal.

That said, I am slowly learning colours, shapes, and rotation.

Hopefully the OpenGL Bible will help further.

Also, creez, if you are familiar with a basic high level language C is pretty easy to learn. The main problem I had with C coming from a PHP background was that of type mismatch errors. In PHP you can use a variable such as an INT as a float and vise versa. However, C is far stricter when it comes to such things and throws out type mismatch errors.

The good thing about C is that you can write a simple program under Linux and it'll compile under windows without any modification as long as you have a C compiler for windows.

Have you looked at XNA? It's Microsoft's homebrew setup and it's free for PC users. It's based around the Managed wrappers for DirectX (I understand these are much simpler and you're also at less risk of crashing your machine) and comes bundled with Visual Studio Express. It's designed to integrate with an msbuild-like toolchain so you can have your own pipeline etc.

I've not really had a reason to play with it but I've heard a lot of good things.

yes true is just that right now i'm into web stuff but maybe after , i still got everything setup for compiling code. if you want to check some rad stuff people do with HLSL you can download rendermonkey from ATI or nvidia FX composer (at the nvidia developper site: NVIDIA Developer Web Site )