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Engine Layout

Started by GaryNas Sep 12, 2006 at 9:59 AM 2 replies 650+ views

Original Post

Sep 12, 2006 at 9:59 AM

Are there any books or articles on how to lay out your game engine? Currently my engine has a ton of features including terrain, normal mapping, entity loading from XML files, and more, BUT my layout causes me trouble. It seems I run into situations where I need entities to talk to each other (such as with collisions), but I just can't seem to make it work. Let me describe a scenario where I have problems: In my scene I have terrain with a house placed on it. How do I allow my player entity to walk into the house? Say I have the house floor board and walls set up as Opcode objects (or whichever collision engine); surely I can't check the player against them every frame because sometimes the player entity will be very far away from it. How would I set something like this up? Thanks for any advice!

Ravuya

296

Ravuya

Sep 12, 2006 at 10:35 AM

You should look into Game Coding Complete; while it doesn't attack your particular domain it does offer a robust set of best practices.

You should also consult Superpig's Enginuity series of articles; while now discontinued there are some real gems in there.

_goat

Sep 12, 2006 at 10:51 AM

Although I would advise against implementing Superpig's memory managment scheme. Even himslef mentioned (several weeks afterwards) that you should use some sort of Boost arrangement. And I for one would use boost:shared_ptr over Superpig's referenced memory managed pointers (with intrusion) almost any day.

But a lot of the rest of the articles are very informative.

GaryNas

Author

GaryNas

Sep 12, 2006 at 11:55 AM

Quote:
Original post by Ravuya
You should look into Game Coding Complete; while it doesn't attack your particular domain it does offer a robust set of best practices.

You should also consult Superpig's Enginuity series of articles; while now discontinued there are some real gems in there.

Thanks for the reply. I read Game Coding Complete a while ago and agree'd with a lot of what the guy had to say. Especially about using middleware (like Miles) instead of creating your own. I completely disagree'd with his assertion about working long hours is a must just to program video games. It's almost like he was bragging that he didn't see his family when he worked at Origin... But that's another topic for another day. :)

I'll definitely check out the articles you mentioned though!

Thanks!

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