What is it and should it be the first thing i program for my game?

game engine is the meat and bones of the game. depending on the game, the task of making one might turn out to be substantial. if your game is 3d, consider looking into somebody else''s engine and licensing it.

I''m no expert on this topic, but this term always bugs me. A lot of times people write a DirectX or OpenGL wrapper and call it an engine. Can someone who has written a REAL engine please explain to me, as well, what that term means??

I have a library that can initialize DirectX, load MAX meshes, sort them by textures, renderstates, etc. and render everything. Did I make an "engine"??

Thanks and sorry for the mini-rant :-)

Just aim to try and replicate (and maybe expand ) on a commercial engine like the quake 2 engine. Engines usually control the whole game too, not just a wrapper for loading and displaying objects in D3D. eg. physics, sound, managing the world map (portal engines or something), user interface, input proccessing...

I havn''t exactly finished an engine but I''m pretty sure that''s what is meant by an "engine".

Frank