hello. i was just wondering if i could get everyone's opinion on something. i'll give some brief background on myself first so you can see my point of view. i started learning c++ about three years ago as a hobby and learned really slowly. i used qbasic before c++ so i had some programming experience. once i got opengl working i created some small 2d demos / games (used SDL as well) but was still overwhelmed by creating a 3d 'engine'. i made a 3d pong clone but that's about it. im not saying i dont know anything about game programming i have decent experience with games using opengl and sdl (2D only), i just dont know a lot about making more complex 3d games. so just today actually i looked into the irrlicht engine. and wow! in about two hours i worked through 3 or 4 tutorials on the site and found it very very easy to use (as easy to use as DarkBASIC). the thing is i feel like im cheating myself not actually learning oct trees, billboards, particle systems, vertex buffers etc. how many of you feel that in todays game development scene learning some of the more lower level things is not neccesary? is going from i can make basic 2d primitives in opengl to hey i can make a fps in irrlicht a bad thing? what's your opinion on this? hopefully my question is clear, but if not i will try and explian better.

There is nothing wrong with using a premade engine. I personally don't use any engine (I never found one that suited me), but I really haven't gotten very far anyway... If you want to make GAMES, then the engine will let you do that much sooner. If all you want to do is set up a renderer, collision detection, physics, etc. yourself, and have much less time for making games, that works too.

I would suggest making games with an engine to learn the structure of the game and how everything should fit together, but at the same time keep learning all the pieces of whatever API you are using.

yeah i think i will do the same thing sorta as i did with STL. i mean when i started using STL i wondered, hey how do they do vectors, lists, maps, etc. so i created my own containers and i think i gained lots from doing that.

i think i will use your advice though, use the enigne, but every now and again *really* learn how things in the engine are accomplished by doing them myself.