Unite 2010GDC ChinaAsia Game Show 2010GDC 2011
Development requires a certain level of EnginuityThis series of mine is going, layer by layer, to take you through building an engine - as you may have guessed, I'm christening it 'Enginuity' (shoot me when I'm done writing). Here's the 'requirements' for the engine:
It's going to be written in C++, and we're not going to work from scratch - we'll use SDL for graphics (and, thus, OpenGL), input, and timers; SDLNet for networking; and FMOD for sound (so if you want to see someone initialize DirectX/OpenGL for the nth time, go somewhere else - there's nothing achieved by reinventing the wheel). That should pretty much fulfill the cross-platform, networked, and minimum technical requirements parts of the spec; the rest is down to us. Feel happy - you can tell people that you're going to 'achieve reusability through modularity in an object-oriented design.' (Not that you couldn't tell people that before, of course. Unless you had your mouth full or something. My point is.. actually, never mind). No series of articles would ever be complete without source code, and rest assured that it will be provided in ample quantities. In fact, the source may cover even more than what I talk about - you'll get to see things that I toyed with before deciding not to discuss - like the bits left over from my attempt to build the engine as a DLL under Windows, and other (usually fairly irrelevant) things that may serve to confirm your fears that I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. I cannot stress enough that an engine is a large, fairly complex topic, and newbies should not even think about approaching it until they're totally competent with the language (C++). Put it this way: If you can work out what a 'templated class that inherits from multiple virtual base classes and overloads the pointer-to-member operator' is, then you're ready. If not, then sorry, but you simply won't understand some of the code and design techniques I'm going to use in the series. You're welcome to glean what you can, but I'm not going to pitch to the lowest level here; if I spend all my time explaining language concepts, we won't get anything done. What's the ultimate aim of this, then? I'm thinking that building a game engine isn't nearly as much fun unless you build a game on top as well (because, let's face it, general-purpose game engines are what you make when you're out of ideas for games). So what I'll try to do is, at opportune times, build simple games (we're talking *really* simple) on the engine in it's state at the time. You can almost think of them as milestones in the development process. That's about all I've got to say for this article. Next week, I'll give you an overview the 'foundation layer' of the engine, and cover some of the most fundamental topics, such as error logging and memory management. In the meantime, you'll want to be reading up and downloading SDKs from the following places: http://www.libsdl.org/ - Home of both SDL and SDLNet (SDLNet in the Libraries section).
Richard Fine (rfine at tbrf dot net)
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