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[InfiniteStateMachine]

For C/C++ I use win32 and openGL (I've been putting off learning linux forever but always leaving a layer of abstraction to add it to my work). I used to use SFML but was curious about what it was doing. After spending a few months with win32 and openGL I wonder what I was afraid of, it's not bad at all.

Of course none of my win32/openGL stuff has audio or text. I'll have to look into freetype and some audio libraries.

If I'm in a position where I want to just focus on making the game and not any engine type code I tend to use something like AS3 or XNA.

[Crimsontide]

I know its not a graphics library, but I couldn't program in C++ without Boost.  As far as graphics libraries I wrote my own that rides on top of DirectX, though it could just as easily be ported to OpenGL.

[kamac]

behemoth like ogre3d

That's right. Ogre3d tends to pause my machine work because of intelli-sense trying to parse it's enormous set of functions. 

[rivon]

woo sfml represent!

also, to contribute my 2c, i can see many indie devs using straight opengl just because its simpler to understand than a behemoth like ogre3d. if your visual requirements are fairly minimal then i'd say its just as easy to build your game in opengl than ogre3d, assuming you've had experience with  graphics programming.

It has a pretty manual and wiki with lots of tutorials. Irrlicht is much easier tho.

unity and udk have even less limitations and are way more flexible than ogre and irrlicht. and you do not even have to program in c++.
BUT:
they are all very static and if you need a very dynamic world, it is easier achieving it in opengl or direct3d.

Unity and UDK are quite a different thing to Irrlicht/Ogre or OGL/DX. Apart from the graphics, they have also physics, net, audio etc. Also, we are talking about C++ stuff here. Not a good comparison.

By the way, how is achieving a "dynamic" world easier in OGL/DX?

That's right. Ogre3d tends to pause my machine work because of intelli-sense trying to parse it's enormous set of functions. 

It seems like you're using a bad IDE then. I never had any problem with this.

[kamac]

It seems like you're using a bad IDE then. I never had any problem with this.

Oh, I didn't know MSVC 2010 sucks. Well, maybe it doesn't, but it's intelli-sense is slow on longer run.

[ThemsAllTook]

By the way, how is achieving a "dynamic" world easier in OGL/DX?

I have an example that may be relevant. In my most recent game, I coded a sword swing animation that I imagine would have been impossible, or at least much more difficult, with something higher level than OpenGL. You can see it in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQoAI0wHpL0

The idea is to draw every pixel in the arc exactly once. Each frame that's drawn starts the arc from the last place it ended, so the user sees a continuous half ellipse as it goes around, with every pixel at the same relative intensity when viewing the animation as a whole. This means that more pixels are filled in one frame if your frame rate drops, but the animation plays at a constant real-time speed. Easy to do in OpenGL, but it seems like it would be a nightmare to get working like that if I didn't have access to low-level drawing commands.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong if you can explain how you'd do this with one of the higher level APIs you mentioned!

[rivon]

I'm not sure if I'm not misunderstanding you but from what I see, you could just make a few frames of animation and play it

[ThemsAllTook]

The non-overlapping interpolation is the important part. Playing an ordinary animation could give you a somewhat similar effect, but at different frame rates it would either skip drawing parts of the arc or draw them in more than one frame.

[rivon]

I dunno, just draw more frames. You wouldn't see a difference anyway unless you have really really good sight.

And if this was a REALLY IMPORTANT feature, you could just use the engine for everything and draw this effect manually in OGL.

Also, I don't see how it would at some frames skip drawing parts of the arc. Frame animation works in a way that you just display one frame and once time of one frame passed you just display the next one (you don't just display the frame once, you display it all the time and then switch with the next).

[eigenbom]

woo sfml represent!

also, to contribute my 2c, i can see many indie devs using straight opengl just because its simpler to understand than a behemoth like ogre3d. if your visual requirements are fairly minimal then i'd say its just as easy to build your game in opengl than ogre3d, assuming you've had experience with  graphics programming.

It has a pretty manual and wiki with lots of tutorials. Irrlicht is much easier tho.

Yeh sure, my point was only that I think it's easier to grasp what opengl does for you, as opposed to a full graphics engine. Ogre3d does an awesome job at making a complex graphics engine easy to use.

[davidemo89]

I'm using Allegro for my prototype, but I will overwrite all my rendering calls when the basic are finished =)

[Archibald]

For now I am really suprised that so many people use OpenGL to create their games. 

It's because indies can not afford to make full blown AAA 3D titles anyway, therefore the gain from a 3D engine would be low. On the other hand, if you just need some simple things like rotation, scaling, alphablending then OpenGL is the easiest and the most convenient choice.
Also 3D engines are not designed for Voxel style games

[rivon]

Well, now that people are watching this thread, I might as well ask here, so here goes: Is anyone here who's using SDL using SDL2? If yes, how does it compare to 1.2? Is it worth it to use it or is it buggy?

[Raptor85]

I'm using SDL2, it's pretty stable at this point and IMHO if you're going to start learning SDL at this point SDL2 is the way to go.  They got rid of things such as the main window being created via making a surface (you actually create windows seperately now), and you bind renderers to the windows (software or hardware).  The support for creating a GL context under whatever version you want is nice too as you can now without any hackery create a GLES11 or GLES20 context, overall it's a pretty good improvement over SDL1.2 and enough of the changes are simple enough it's pretty easy to port existing applications across.  The "official" support for android NDK and iphone in SDL2 is nice also

[Fallsburg]

PolyCode

At least, I've messed around with it and were I to write a game in C++, I would probably use it.