4 ms·
To anyone thinking about writing a game engine. I've been cranking on a 2D engine for over 4 years and have put thousands of hours of work into it. My summary
by samiv 2y ago
To anyone thinking about writing a game engine.
I've been cranking on a 2D engine for over 4 years and have put thousands of hours of work into it.
My summary:
If you want to write a game, just write a game. Don't start with your own engine since this will suck all your time and you'll end up spending 90% on engine and very little getting the game game done. Especially so in the beginning when you have no features and doing anything in the game requires engine work.
If you choose to create your own engine it's a compelling and fantastic domain where problems come in all shapes and sizes and you can and get to work with physics, maths, linear algebra, audio, rendering, graphics APIs, system level programming, most likely native programming AND scripting, game content, technical art etc.
But finally the real work is not the engine but the tooling and the editor around the engine.
If (when) you rely on free assets from (for example opengameart) you can expect no consistency. Not just the art style but just the technical part too, like your models are all inconsistent in shapes and sizes and axis, 2D content such as textures are by default without any meta data etc. So you really need to create a ton of tooling so that you can have sensible workflows and you can extract and consume the usable and interesting parts of any content package easily.
This inevitably leads to the concept of "editor" which easily comes with a ton of work by itself that has nothing to do with game or game engine per se. For example the concept of "Project", windows, resource management, basic editing functionality for creating content, undo/redo/ etc. A lot of this is not really related to the game or the engine in anyway but you really sort of "must have it" if you want to create something that is actually usable.
The feature creep is real! But once you get the over a lot of the boiler plate and you can actually use your own editor to stuff content into your own engine and have it running it's really a nice feeling even if nobody else cares!
On the technical side my advice is really to be able to do first principles type of thinking. It's of utmost importance to be able to break things apart into self contained features and pieces that the game can then combine to create bigger constructs.
If you can have your materials scroll textures vertically, when you combine that with shapes that are layered and place textures onto those shapes that scroll at various multiples of your "characters" speed then you've just created "parallax scrolling" essentially.
-----
https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator
- fidotron 2y agoI think the trap people fall into is to have things be overly specific in the name of optimization they never get to achieving anyway. For instance, I find you can get massive mileage by declaring “(almost) everything is instanced”, then you batch it, forget it, move on. There are similar shortcuts to be made with physics and so on. The close to ideal engine, in terms of approaches to problems, was LittleBigPlanet. That was a small team that were really good, but crucially they had the right way to frame the problems so as to constrain the emergent complexity of the result.
- samiv 2y ago"I think the trap people fall into is to have things be overly specific in the name of optimization they never get to achieving anyway." Yes I agree, writing a specific functionality in the engine does allow for more optimal performance but the tradeoff is that it's more brittle and more complicated to write and maintain. My personal approach has been to do the first principles and avoid writing use-case specific features in the engine as much as possible but provide more fundamental functionality that the game then combines to create the desired effect. That being said I've still had to do some concessions and move stuff like simple constant velocity game object integration to the engine side simply because the perf difference between native code doing that vs Lua code are just too massive.
- hedvig23 2y agoA question then, I have run some game servers in my time that had quite advanced console options and scripts to run, in Lua, which I then saw as maybe the most common language in this area. But I wondered where and why Lua which is its own full language was kept to a certain part of the game and running instance, and where the other runtime and the games main language differed. How is that division of responsibility separated or chosen I guess?
- samiv 2y agoThere's no single answer to this, it all depends on the game, the engine and the team(s) executing the engine and game. Some typical ways to divide this though is Some org has "engine" team and "game" team. Engine team implements features in the engine itself and game team implements game specific features using the embedded scripting language. Engine features are game agnostic and game features are specific to games and are scripted / built-on top of the engine features. But sometimes things get muddled as general purpose engines are used in games that require specific features in the engine itself. Typically the decision is then made by a) what kind of feature and how does it fit in the architecture of the engine b) what are the performance requirements c) who is willing to do the work and maintain it