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I've lost count of how many times I've eagerly started a new game engine project - yet I still haven't learned how absolutely gargantuan that kind of project is

• edapiieaway 4y ago
  The hard part is the editor. You can make a nice 3D renderer, learn shaders, bring in a physics library, make a bunch of models and textures, write a lighting system, add a system of animation, make an actor/AI system, create 2D UI helpers for menus/HUDs, work out a file format for storing and loading state... ...And then realize that it's very difficult to create a detailed world when you can't see it and manipulate it in realtime. D'oh.
• dkersten 4y ago
  Sounds like me. It’s been my recurring project, restarted every few years. My previous one got as far as a module system, multithreaded job system, basic event system, ECS and a usable editor based on Dear ImGUI but has very limited rendering, if you could call it that at all. My latest iteration is actually making some strides and has most of the above plus Lua scripting, a scene system, notification events (x happened) as well as messages (events posted specifically to entities or groups of entities) and asynchronous resource loading. I am currently cleaning up the code and then I plan to add PhysX support. Rendering is still very basic though. But that’s ok, it’s my for fun personal project, where I can tackle the challenges that are interesting or fun to me (I enjoy creating a cache efficient messaging system based on a paged stack allocator memory pool... these are things I absolutely don’t need but really enjoy writing). Will I ever complete it or make a substantial game with it? Probably not. But it keeps programming enjoyable (and helps me retain some c++ knowledge)