Best Engine

I started out with the CDL lib''s and then tried SDL (which was too slow for me) so I wrote my own library.

By writing your own libs you can implement onlt what you want to implement and not have the overheads of other libs (like SDL''s cross platform / OpenGL stuff).

Down side of writing your own is it will not be cross platform and limited to your knowledge.

When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleages come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
"Write in C."

Of course, you can make it cross-platform!

The real downside is the investment of time you spent writing an engine instead of a game

Own engine is best engine.

The best engine is the one that does what you want it to in the least amount of time. Yes, you can make it faster (if you really know what you''re doing anyway), but it will also eat up a large portion of your dev time. If there is an off-the-shelf option that does what you need or that can be altered to do what you need, then go for it. The time spent on learning the engine and the slight sacrifice in speed will be made up drastically by the time gained from shorter developement time, which you can use for optimization. It may be "cool" to write your own, but that''s just not practical is there is another option...especially if your an indy or hobbiest developer.

i wrote a little pseudo engine using sdl.
sdl does most of the work for me, so it took about one day to write it.
and it''s fast enough for me. and if i want something faster i use sdl+opengl.