I am trying to write a game engine, or a game that has some structure. I have seen the speed of some game engines like Irrlicht and Quake and does anyone know how they get speeds like that or what language and API they were written in? Also, are graphics in SDL OpenGL any worse than Cocoa OpenGL because sometimes they look better in Cocoa.

OpenGL is what games like Quake use. OpenGL is the fast graphics path on the Mac. OpenGL visual quality is the same across any API whether it be through Cocoa or SDL or whatever, there is no difference. The only visual quality difference you might have seen is across different machines since different video card models and brands do tend to render things a bit differently, but that has nothing to do with any given API. Another thing you might possibly be seeing is stuff using Cocoa and Quartz perhaps and mistaking it for OpenGL? Quartz is a different animal altogether and has much much higher 2D visual quality, but it's generally too slow for games so we don't use it for that.

So if you want fast, you want OpenGL.

Quake 3 is written in C (and is open source).

It doesn't hurt that computers are about a zillion times faster than they were 8 years ago when Quake 3 was new. You could probably write Q3 in any language and it'd be fine.

FreakSoftware Wrote:It doesn't hurt that computers are about a zillion times faster than they were 8 years ago when Quake 3 was new. You could probably write Q3 in any language and it'd be fine.

As long as you don't do your vertex class & operators in Objective-C but fall back to plain C or Obj-C++...

Though I might point out that very few (any?) AAA game engines written today use C; most use C++ and scripting.