From my experience, they are primarily just ways to find the coordinates of where things are (e.g hill giant can be found at 100,100 on the mainscreen) and reading text (e.g health is currently 65/89). Reflection can see more than just what the player can see but let's ignore that for now..
Regarding script effectivity ingame (ignoring script writing efficiency, time & effort are important factors that are largely being ignored here):
Poorly done reflection > poorly done color
very well done color > very well done reflection
Reflection is more likely to have client breaking updates whereas color scripts can still be working years later without modification, if the activity hasn't changed much visually. This is also ignoring the fact that reflection can see more than just what the player can & don't forget that the majority of scripts are somewhere inbetween poorly done & very well done.
Regarding script writing efficiency:
Whichever you have a person to get help from. This usually is [and should be] the deciding factor for a newbie
Without that, reflection is probably easier for both newbies & experienced people once the basics are figured out, but this is quite the stretch for me to say as I've pretty much never written a line of reflection code (the closest thing to that would be editting an opengl script of @
3Garrett3;s and telling @
Fitta; "shit aint working yo!" after reflection updates)
If you're primarily looking for quickly gaining achievements ingame on osrs, I would say reflection would be a better start if you can get the hang of it, since it's far easier to get worthwhile ingame data from (imo).
If your main goals currently are primarily academic, I would say color since it's not as limited to just the specific game that you're currently on (osrs) & is the main focus here (villavu), though I am biased in this as I have very very little experience with reflection.
I personally would recommend trying to get a script working in each and deciding where to go after that based on what you prefer from your experience with both. There's more options to consider, but you made this thread saying that you're overwhelmed so I should probably stop now heh ^.^ If you wanna talk on skype about anything, im quite free this semester =)
oh & btw, while I've never looked at any osrs guides and thus don't have any to personally recommend, I would recommend checking out the guides by @
The Mayor; and @
Clarity; if you have some time. The later especially isn't going to help you directly, but can give ideas of what's happening in general.
You're definitely not going to be using opengl for osrs as it doesn't even touch the gpu, but it's more similar in concept to reflection than color (though opengl provides you with less data and does so in a far more hardware inefficient manner), imo anyways.
Just rambling whilst killing some time inbetween classes, do let me know if this ends up being helpful =)