Hello all,

As a personal interest, I would like to start developing a 3D game engine for creating procedural environments. Having read these forums for a while, I know that many of you will be inclined to advise against making my own engine so I want to start off by saying that I understand your opposition. This is something I want to do out of personal interest as a learning experience (and just for something extra to tinker with).

To give a little background about myself, I already know how to program (c++, java, python, etc). I have a BS and MS in Computer science and am currently a software engineer at one of the major software companies. I did my MS focusing on machine learning and natural language processing but have never really done any graphics programming (which is one of the motivations for this project).

In this post, I'm primarily looking for advice on where to start in terms of general advice and materials that are helpful (books are good). So these are the current questions that I have.

1) What are the primary trade-offs between openGL and directX development? Would you advise against either of those for a beginner or for my use case (if so, why)?

2) Given your answer to the first question, what resources would you recommend to begin learning either of those tools? (this includes resources that cover libraries for sound, i/o, ui, etc.)

3) Do you have any resources about procedural game engines (about any aspect) or procedural generation in general?

4) (related to question 2) What resources would you recommend to learn about game engine development (tips, tricks, architecture, etc.)?

I'm thinking that c++ would probably be the best language to target here but I'm open to thoughts about choice of language as well.

Thanks for your thoughts

Hey! Good to see someone with similar interests as me :) I'm no expert in the field, but here's my experience:

1.) I generally like OpenGL because it's cross-platform. I work on a mac so DirectX is out for that....so I don't have much advice here.

2.) Depends on the language....I use Java and therefore follow the LWJGL tutorials. For C++, I'd probably go through the NEHE tutorials. There's also plenty of general openGL documentation all over the internet, as well as a few good programming channels on Youtube that do good tutorials (For example, I followed Oskar Veerhoek on youtube to get FBO's and such ironed out on my game engine using LWJGL).

3.) There's many good things online, for example this. That procworld website introduced me to using Grammars for creating procedural buildings and other structures. I also HIGHLY RECOMMEND Texturing and Modeling a Procedural Approach by David Eberly....it'll walk you through noise, fractals, perlin, texturing, terrain, etc. I constantly use it as a good source of procedural knowledge.

4.) Many things exist for game engine architecture, design, etc. Theres the David Eberly books (he seems to know his stuff, right...?) on game engines. They are good examples of a full game engine and documentation and discussion on why he made choices, but most of it is tailored to a general purpose engine. I've learned the most form looking at source code and documentation of engines that are already available to learn overall architecture tips.

As for language, C++ is fine and it's all up to you! I chose Java because I was more familiar with it and I could code so, so much faster in that language (5 years experience compared to my 1.5 years in C++). Since LWJGL is available for Java, that was great!

Good luck and have fun! If you're interested start a journal to document your work :) I'd love to see where this goes.

--ST

As I agree with the use of OpenGL portability, if you plan on making a game to sell, all your sales will be on the Windows platform. So use OpenGL because you perfer it over DirectX. Also, XAct make it very easy to add complex sound scripting into your engine.