Hi all I am not sure if this question has been asked before or not, but I would like to know ppl''s thoughts on commercial game libraries such as Fastgraph and CDX. I am sure there are others out there as well, these were the first two that I thought of. What are the strengths and weaknesses of both? Are the appropriate for a newbie game developer, such as myself? Currently I am using Andre Lamothe''s T3DLIB''s from his new book. Thanks all Valhalla Donald Cathcart

CDX is not commercial. It''s free.

CDX is a C++ class library that wraps DX. It''s maintained by several people in the CDX community. If you want to learn DX, don''t use it. Study the source if you want to, but write your own wrapper for DX and you''ll learn more. If all you want to do is concentrate on game code, then CDX, Allegro, ClanLib, and SDL are all good choices because they''re free. I''ve not tried ClanLib or SDL, but I personally didn''t like CDX''s design, and Allegro is just too bulky for my tastes. I just wrote my own.

If you want FastGraph, you need to be prepared to shell oout some cash. It''s $399 for the full version ($499 with Font and data file suuport). FastGraph/Light is the trial version, which has all the functionality of the full version and, in 6.0 (which is currently in Beta) has no 30-day lock up. The only catch is you need to use the FastGraph runtime manager to run any apps created with FG/Light, and every app displays a dialog at start-up saying it is illegal to distribute it. So, if you want to distribute your games you need to pay for it.

FastGraph *is* fast. You can write apps with/without DX support. Its 3D software rendering is several times faster than D3D software rendering. The syntax takes some getting used to, but I find it to be a really great lib.