Hi everyone, for my final game project here at Full Sail, me and five other people are planning on building a small first person shooter game using DirectSound, DirectInput, OpenGL, and Tokamak Physics. We are planning on building the game engine ourselves rather than using an open-source one. Does anyone have any advice, tips, or useful information about desiging/writing your own game engine? Any resources would be greatly helpful, thanks!

Thank you! Does anyone else have anything useful?

Quote:Original post by silvermace
dont use tokamak, its terrible for FPS's
maybe Newton Game Dynamics (Free) or Novadex (Free for
Education, and you only have to pay a licence fee once your
game is released)

i'd recomend Novadex (I'd even say its better than Havok)

Why do you say that? What about Tokamak makes it a bad choice? Our primary focuses are that the SDK is reasonably easy to use and that it will not hog a large amount of the system's resources. Thanks!

Also if anyone has any useful information about any other aspect of game engine design, please post!

[Edited by - Dominicds on September 19, 2004 6:07:56 PM]

Use tokamak it is fast and efficient, that guy either hasn't used it or used it incorrectly.

How long do you plan to build this engine?

I see how you already have planned out what API's you are using, which definitely makes it easier than an API independent engine. But it still requires some structure designing for how each component will work together and the overall integration into the engine. When alot of people work on it sometimes it is better just to "wrap" these objects. For instance, someone could be implementing directsound, while someone is integrating into the engine. Using a set of polymorphic classes and some callbacks you can do this fairly easy.

If you need an example I have a little site on tutorials in which it is setup to render opengl or DX without the engine even knowing which one is used (it just clears a buffer and render black, but it is structures themselves which are useful).

http://dmoney.no-ip.org/tutorials.php

Quote:Original post by jimmynelson
Use tokamak it is fast and efficient, that guy either hasn't used it or used it incorrectly.

I thought this may be the case, I've heard some good things about Tokamak. Although at this point we could possibly be considering using Newton or ODE instead.

Quote:
How long do you plan to build this engine?

Right now we're in the very begining planning phases, we're planning to ramp up to full development at the end of Oct. and be finished by the end of January.

Quote:
I see how you already have planned out what API's you are using, which definitely makes it easier than an API independent engine. But it still requires some structure designing for how each component will work together and the overall integration into the engine. When alot of people work on it sometimes it is better just to "wrap" these objects. For instance, someone could be implementing directsound, while someone is integrating into the engine. Using a set of polymorphic classes and some callbacks you can do this fairly easy.

This seems like a very good idea for creating a modular game engine. Thanks!

Quote:

If you need an example I have a little site on tutorials in which it is setup to render opengl or DX without the engine even knowing which one is used (it just clears a buffer and render black, but it is structures themselves which are useful).

http://dmoney.no-ip.org/tutorials.php

Thanks a lot! I haven't had a chance to check out your site, but I'm going to put it at the top of my to-do list.