Game engine software design resources

April 7, 2009 7:49 AM

I consider myself a competent programmer, but I need to do some software design and so I am looking for some resources. Do you have any advice for what to do when designing a game engine?

I am designing a revision of a surgical simulation system that functions very much like a game. My first version gets the job done, but it is getting more and more difficult to debug and add features to. I'm in a position to rewrite the system, but I want to try to avoid the problems I'm having now with a solid design but add features like scripting to make the system more easily extensible.

Since my system is very much like a game engine (real-time I/O, graphics), I'm looking for any advice on articles or books that may have been helpful to someone in my position.

posted by demiurge to computers & internet (3 comments total)

The Game Programming Gems series will probably help you out. Useful information is sort of scattered throughout but if you had friends in the industry you could probably get your hands on them. Subjects such as preparing your engine for scripting are explicitly covered, as are a number of other things such as the game loop, which should help you, and asset management.
posted by jon_kill at 7:53 AM on April 7

One thing to consider is to look at the design of existing engines. There are several open source ones (Quake 1, 2, and 3, OGRE, Delta 3D, Irrlicht, and Crystal Space) and several that are inexpensive, at least to independent developers (Torque, C4, Unity). Of those, some allow you to purchase licenses that include the engine source code.

I can tell you from first hand experience that Torque (specifically TGEA and the new Torque 3D) has a very robust scripting model. A complete game could be written without ever touching the compiled code.

As a tip, many game engines do their scripting using the Lua language.
posted by jedicus at 8:34 AM on April 7

this (sulaco.co.za) site helped me a lot. It's tutorials are written in Delphi, but it's an easy enough language to understand if you know C/C++ or similar syntax languages. It's also pretty much all OpenGL.
posted by hungrysquirrels at 9:01 AM on April 7