Game engine

I've always thought of a game being seperated into 2 main parts:

The Data
The Game Engine

The Data is all of the stuff like media (models, textures etc), gamedata (levels, savegames etc). The Game Engine takes this data, does what it has to do with it and lets the user PLAY with the game data.

The Game Engine is usually broken down into smaller parts - graphics, audio, input, file management etc.

Hope this helps!

The engine is the actuall program part of the game, anything that is not content.
Content is anything not hard coded, including scripts

Hope this helps

Quote:

Original post by Synex I've always thought of a game being seperated into 2 main parts: The Data The Game Engine The Data is all of the stuff like media (models, textures etc), gamedata (levels, savegames etc). The Game Engine takes this data, does what it has to do with it and lets the user PLAY with the game data. The Game Engine is usually broken down into smaller parts - graphics, audio, input, file management etc.

I would make another distinction. I submit that the Game Engine and the Game Logic are seperate. That is, the engine provides an interface for video, audio, collision detection, networking, and input operations (much more elaborate, but I think that gets the point across). The game logic is the code specific to each game. This kind of orginization allows the game engine to be used for many different games.

I agree with MHamlin. A game engine is everything that is not specific to a particular game. Therefore the control modules for graphics, input, music, sound, and networking are all part of a game engine.

There are other modules as well, such as AI and Physics, but those a re harder to separate from the game logic.

An engine is what is left once you remove the Game Logic...

Whatever is left is the "support structure"... the engine...

There is no need to have a complex definition just because an engine is a complex piece of software engineering.

OK, so in a way, my tile map editor is part of my engine. Along with some structures I keep and use for all the games I wish to create such as the tile structure, sprite structure etc. Right?

In most of the major game engines, the logic is not hard-coded into the game, rather it is held by scritps, which are a resource.

As for the tile editor, that's not so much part of the engine, as part of the tool set. The structures are a part of the engine, as they manage the resources.