Holy Engine Design Batman!

Published June 24, 2005
Advertisement
Somebody slap me because I have the urge to make my own....... engine!

I was talking to dgreen02 and I asked him how long he thought it would take to make a simple 3d engine composing of these vague requriments:

-A mesh loader
-lighting
-Input processing
-Sprites & Fonts
-Height maps
-Shadows
-Collision Detection
-Realistic Car physics
-Node partitioning (didn't include that one in the chat)

He said something like this: "~month, if you work pretty hard. It's possible to do it under a month if you work really hard."

Do you all agree? If not, I don't care, I'm too hardheaded to change my mind now :)

I'll use Direct3D 8 since I've got some experience there, for physics: tokamak, for sound: FMOD.
Previous Entry 4e4
0 likes 7 comments

Comments

paulecoyote
Haha! Go for it. Right now I don't think I could pull off writing a decent engine and a game that uses it within the time-limit - but it sounds like you have experience in the graphics side of things so who knows? It could happen!
June 24, 2005 07:21 PM
HopeDagger
It depends how much of a l33t hax0rz you are. There's no way I could assemble something like that in a month, but I know of several people around here that could and still have time to barbeque a hotdog. With mustard.
June 24, 2005 08:08 PM
johnhattan
June 24, 2005 08:38 PM
noaktree
Quote:Somebody slap me because I have the urge to make my own....... engine!
Slap!!

Depends on how nice you want the code to be. If you're asking how long it will take then I'm assuming that you don't have the personal experience to make your own assessment. But if you do and you're just making cool conversation then I'd say a week or two with dx, tokamak, and fmod should be all you'd need. [smile] Of course the code may not be pretty and you won't get much sleep but it's possible.

If all else fails then please refer to Mr. Hattan's diagram. [grin]
June 24, 2005 09:45 PM
paulecoyote
That flow diagram of johnhattan is way funny [grin]
June 25, 2005 03:12 AM
The Forgotten Mindset
*dodges noaktree's slap* :)

I don't expect my code to look very nice, I understand the give and take of things in this business.

Actually, I'm not sure if it deserves the title of "engine" because I was just going to slap a megalation of classes together under an object, but I guess that's what all engines are in bold sense.

Really guys, it's not going to be much, just a layer or so above DirectX, but I would'nt go as far as to call it just a wrapper.

Mabey it's a wrengine :P

And I did have an idea of how long it would take, I just wanted an expert opinion. A month or so is about what I was thinking, I knew I wouldn't go deep with it.

Oh, and John, your diagram is lacking. I fixed it:

June 25, 2005 07:20 PM
coderx75
Sure, write your own engine. But write a very thorough "adaptor" class so that you don't have to change your whole app once you decide that XYZ 3D engine would better suit your needs.
August 02, 2005 01:01 AM
You must log in to join the conversation.
Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
Advertisement

Latest Entries

Advertisement