3D data

It greatly depends on what game you''re trying to construct.

My game needs no BSP trees like many of the quake style games, but it''s a 3d space shooter and has no FPS / indoor elements.

When sitting down to code the engine, I got greatly frustrated about the hundreds of tutorials around. While yes, they show you how to load a mesh, etc, they do not tell you how to organise things.

For my game I decided that it should be like a film. Each film has a scene, each scene has cameras (movable), lights (movable) and actors. Actors wear costumes (textures) and follow scripts when moving around stage.

These actors were my models (a group of meshes) which each contains it''s own positions, scale and rotation matrices. They also hold information about the texture of the mesh and a pointer to a stored version of the mesh info (eg: the faces, vertices, position offset into he vertex buffer, etc).

The animation is something I''ve not done yet, but this will be the keyframe system; allowing smooth and scripted movement of any of the camera, light or actor objects in the scene.

Each scene has a list of the required actors and this is used to draw the objects on each cycle of the renderloop.

Dunno if this is any help. I''m part way through my game and still consider myself a newbie to PC games programming; simply because with modern games, C++ and the complexity of it all I found myself swimming in deep water. Even though I''ve had a lot of games programming experience on the Amiga platform (but that WAS BASIC!).