Good Day to all, I have spent my last 6 months learning up directx, SDL and skimped through a little bit of OGRE. Things I have done so far: followed through creating the "Programming role playing game with dirextx 9" book game, The Towers.(With alot of reference and guide from the book n the resources given) Read up tutorials about SDL and did some experiments with it. I spent the last 2 weeks looking at OGRE which I feel it is something i couldnt handle yet. I intend to look into creating win32 applications programs, creating tools that can be used for games(scripts). The problem is I think im spending too much time learning bits and pieces of everything and now im not sure where to head to. Would sincerely like to get advise on what to do next and how to progress furthur.. I believe I should start programming some of my own games as my next step but the big question is to use directx or SDL?

You'll find a lot of things that appear out of reach are much easier than expected when you actually give them a try. :)

In a very loose nutshell, SDL is very portable and easy to learn. DirectX is essentially Windows-only and much more complicated (hopefully you're comfortable working with objects.) SDL makes 2D games much easier to work on (implementing native 2D methods and requiring little effort to set up and use) but IIRC it doesn't have any native 3D support and piggy-backs on OpenGL, so you'll have to learn that one too to move on.

You're going to get a veritable slew of people claiming DirectX is faster because of xyz, or SDL is the way to go because DirectX isn't portable, etc, etc. The only advice I can give you is to figure out what it is you're trying to build and see which of these two APIs best apply to your situation.

My personal opinion, for what it's worth, would be to go with SDL if you're in no hurry. You're probably going to want to start small (ie, Pong, Tetris, Space Invaders... no Grand Theft Auto 5, not any time soon at least) and you'll be able to get results fast - this is very encouraging when starting out. When you've grown more accustomed to writing a game, are comfortable enough to use the language without looking things up every few minutes, and start having more ambitious projects, then you should start learning something more serious.

OpenGL would probably be more convinient after this point (seeing as SDL supports it natively) but personally I've always been a DirectX man...

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