(Part 2) Top products from r/opengl

Well if you want to be the next Carmack, get cracking! :) You have a lot of ground to cover, such as: mathematics (matrices, linear algebra, etc), physics, artificial intelligence, real-time processing, multithreading, architecture, networking and protocols, rendering, sound, and much more!

It is certainly possible with enough time and dedication to develop your own engine. It's just that there are so many excellent engines already out there, that you would be competing with projects that have already invested many thousands of hours and have loads of titles already developed for them. Why not get involved with an existing project to start?

BTW I really like your idea of creating a FPS with one room and focusing on making that environment the richest possible, exploiting a wide variety of techniques. Do it!!

Is your ultimate goal to create an engine? Or to create a game? Remember, the engine is in many ways a means to an end - it's not much use without a game that uses it!

Either way, I think you would be well advised to get involved with one of the open source game engine projects, and start contributing. Once you've learned how they work, you will be in a much better position to design your own. And realistically, you can't really just design an engine without a game - you need to know how games work in the first place, and what features and architectural decisions and designs make for a good engine.

Consider joining:

• Ogre - http://www.ogre3d.org/
  
• Godot - https://godotengine.org
  
  Here's a list of good books to get you started:
  
  
• Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory
  
• 3D Game Engine Design by David Eberly
  
• Mathematics for 3D Game Programming by Eric Lengyel
  
• Game Physics by David Eberly
  
  The Reddit /r/gamedev wiki has a great list of resources:
  
  
• https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/wiki/resources
  
  There are lots of great videos on YouTube featuring Carmack's gamedev talks, so I highly recommend watching those too.
  

I'm learning OpenGL as you, and I took a parallel approach. On first thread I'm doing rapid coding by hit and trial, building things out of a simple hello world kind of programs.

While on the second thread, I'm getting the basics of Computer Graphics clearer everyday by reading some excellent things, like I've Interactive Computer Graphics: Top Down Approach by my bedside and articles referred above stack up on my bookmark.

And this approach is very helpful, because on the first hand I'm building something amazing everyday, and on the other I'm learning how that thing actually works on the inside.

Well, you can't really go wrong with OpenGL Programming Guide: The official guide to learning OpenGL also widely known as "the red book". It has been a staple for learning OpenGL for decades, and the recent version is updated to OpenGL 4.5 which is one minor-version away from the latest version.

The only downside is that the latest edition of the book has taken a nosedive in layout- and typographic quality; my earlier book from around 2003 had color images of great quality and was laid out well. Read the reviews before purchasing. Also, the red book does not work well as a standalone tutorial in my opinion; use it as a supplement in addition to other sources. Specifically it lacks a more 'high level' perspective. It assumes much of the reader's academic or professional background.

I don't expect any new great books on OpenGL being published anytime soon. The API is considered 'final' after version 4.6 and Vulkan is generally taking over OpenGL's responsibilities regardless of whether Vulkan truly is feasible to use in the same application domains as OpenGL. That said, any book from 2010 and upwards that covers OpenGL 3.0 or later is still reasonably close to the latest version in my opinion. Once you get the basics down, you can consult each later OpenGL specification to figure out the incremental changes. The changes in each OpenGL version is mentioned in its own appendix at the end of the specification. For some years now you can even download a version of the OpenGL specification which has all the changes marked in highlighted color and/or strikethrough, which also helps. When learning OpenGL, https://www.opengl.org/registry is an invaluable resource.

Im in the same boat as you but I have paddled for sometime, here is the books that are awesome to work with:

1. Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with Shader-Based OpenGL (6th Edition).
   
   2)3D Math Primer For Graphics And Game Development
   
   3)Fundamentals of Computer Graphics
   
   these 3 books will come very handy when you start computer graphics...the main one is the Interactive Computer Graphics book, written by Edward Angel, Dave Shreiner, Dave Shreiner is an awesome guy and he is also one of the authors of OpenGL programming guide.
   
   with that being said these books dont teach OpenGL, they teach Graphics, and all these books are advance, because let's face it 3D & graphics in general are hard topics..
   
   Interactive Computer Graphics takes a nice approach to both the math and the concepts, it also introduces the basics of modern OpenGL using shaders, the problem about it for me is its a bit hard to get the math, because it assumes that you got linear algebra down but it has some appendices with it that explain some math but nowhere near enough.
   
   The other two books unfortunately I havent been able to get into but they are very recommended by people around the web.
   
   So if you can read all three at the same time...they will help in every way.
   
   if you need more help or want to know how far I have come, then by all means shoot me a PM..or I will shoot you one.

I suggest disconnecting the two. You need to have a firm grasp on C or C++ programming before going into graphics. It's a long road, but worth it.

This book is considered the authoritative source on C programming, written by the creator: http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming-Language-2nd-Edition/dp/0131103628

Here are some text based tutorials that I used to learn OpenGL recently.

http://openglbook.com/the-book/

http://www.swiftless.com/tutorials/opengl4/1-opengl-window.html

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming

Good luck!

Besides the other suggestions in this thread I'd also recommend the OpenGL Superbible.

Even though it's OpenGL 4.3 and c++, it's still an excellent place to start

The 4th edition only talk about OpenGL 2.1, if you want to learn modern OpenGL ( 3.x ) buy the 5th edition ( http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-SuperBible-Comprehensive-Tutorial-Reference/dp/0321712617/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319548380&sr=1-2 ), but it's only about OpenGL 3.3, not 4.x.

The link alexincode gave you is very good even if it's for OpenGL 3.3 too. But, the author seems to keep updating the tutorial, so it's possible to see an update for OpenGL 4.x.

OK, so right now I have three books in question (priority in that order):

1. Real-Time Rendering (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Time-Rendering-Third-Edition-Akenine-Moller/dp/1568814240/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361457638&sr=8-1)
   
   
2. Physically based Rendering (Through not out yet) (https://www.amazon.de/Physically-Based-Rendering-Matt-Pharr/dp/0128006455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474833345&sr=8-1&keywords=physically+based+rendering)
   
   
3. Introduction to Algorithms (Very famous authors, but already know half/most of the algorithms) (https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-3rd-MIT-Press/dp/0262033844/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=)
   
   What do you think?

I don't think so, I was talking about this one : http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-SuperBible-Comprehensive-Tutorial-Reference/dp/0321498828/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319536743&sr=8-1

Almost all of what I know I learned from this book. When I was learning ES 2.0 there was pretty much no reference material on the subject as nobody used it.

Shaders are pretty simple, however they're a pain in the ass as you have to do everything yourself, which is both an advantage and disadvantage.