Depends on what exactly you want to do... if you want to make a standard 3D game quickly with basic technology I'd use something like Unity. Or you could piece some stuff together with Ogre and other libraries.

Hi everybody,

I been programming in c++ for a while (about a year) but have'nt learnt DirectX or OpenGL yet. I was wondering if I should just use libraries like Ogre or IrrLicht because then I'd able to get a game working quickly without much trouble. My university is teaching DirectX next semester in a unit called c++ game programming so I'm thinking I should just use DirectX to build a game. Since I hope to get into the industry I also wanted to check whether they would prefer programmers to able to build engines from scratch or would they prefer programmers who can pick up and use libraries quickly?

There are some options you should consider.

1. learning a hardware near API:
When you want to learn an graphics API like DirectX and OpenGL you will learn a lot of basic stuff. This stuff could help you to understand how hardware works and what to do to establish certain effects.

2. learning to build a render/game engine:
An API like DirectX and OpenGL is quite low-level. To create a render engine you need to do a lot more using advanced algorithms for culling, batching, shader management, texture managing, quad/oct trees, scenegraphs etc. To learn about a rendering engine Ogre is not a bad choice, it is open source and the code is freely available. You can use and hack around with it, learn about certain implementation features. There's a large community and lot of tutorials available.

3. "Commercial" engines:
There are certain engines available which are commercial but support "free" licenses for certain uses. Unity and UDK to be named. These engines are more than a simple rendering engine often including scripting, AI, sound, ... modules and lot of good support tools.

IMHO starting with 1. or 3. will be the most easiest. When you want to get into the game industry as graphics programmer starting with 1 to get the hang on the basics is a must have in my opinion. As game designer etc. 3 would be the best thing to start with. Eventually the most common aspect of all three approaches is the use of shaders, either using a shader language (GLSL, HLSL,Cg) or a tool (UDK).