lighting methods?

I've got three main situations where I'm going to need some sort of lighting method for my demo (space sim). 1) Sun - The sun will be a far off sphere, probably with a corona, but I want it to cast light on the entire sceen in realtime, so that when ships fly around in 3D you can see portions facing the sun being lit. 2) Engines - each ship will have a series of engines and thrusters that will be "fired" at some point or another and I'd like to have a lighting effect here. 3) Weapons - The fighters will be shooting plasma bursts which will either be spheres or plains with transparency maps. The thing is, I'd like them to cast light a certain distance so when they get near a hull you can see their light shine on the hull. Now, being new to OpenGL I have no idea how to do this. I've seen several methods of dynamic lighting, or faking dynamic lighting but I'm not sure which to use and, most importantly, where to find a good tutorial on any given implementation. I did find a site that had a few spheres in a room rotating and translating around, each casting off light onto the walls as they approached but naturally the source format is not C++ which is what I need So, if anyone could point out a good implementation to use to get the above 3 effects complete as well as a good tutorial on that implementaion I'd be most thankful Thanks, Dotren [edited by - Dotren on April 20, 2003 12:48:16 AM]