Find a bunch of good websites, a couple of good books and program it yourself, bit by bit. I recommend the bool "Open GL Game Programming", one of the series edited by Andre LaMothe.

It got me started on a bunch of things.

Also, download the source code for version 1 of an open source engine, and take a look.

A full-functioning engine would have many-many-many header files and source files.

But an engine can also be really simple. You can write code for setting up an OpenGL window and displaying a 3d cube rotating.

That's an engine. I mean, it doesn't do much, but that is an engine.

Basically an engine is a framework that you can use to make writing a game easier. So, if you write a graphics engine and have that working, you can write the game on top of that, and not worry about any of the graphics code.

Or like some game engine's give you the ability to mod them. The game engine takes care of all the setting up, shutting down, graphics display and audio code, so all you have to do it program the game logic (AI, player movement, etc).

Edit:: The irrlicht v0.1 engine has 61 source files and 122 header files, and that doesn't include the code from the jpeg library and zlib.

Just to throw my hat in the ring, I go through the creation of a simple engine/framework/library in my soon-to-be-released book.

I'm trying to keep it as light as possible, but all the code is there for any other objects/behaviours you want to add to it.

It's based on the SDL libraries along with OpenGL.

hth,

Quote:Original post by Just Chris

So I've recently created a set of functions that make it easy to display integer values as graphical fonts. If these functions are isolated to their own file, would this be a simple font engine?

My loose definition of an "engine" is just a collection/library of objects that help speed up either the scene or the overall development process in general.

So to answer your question, in my view I would definitely label that as a "font engine".

when you think of an engine, think of a train engine or car engine. It's the stuff going on that combusts gasoline to push the pistons and power the vehicle. A well designed engine will perform a task faster and cleaner than a poorly designed engine. Your game engine will probably need to deal with Input, Objects, Rendering, Sound, Particle effects maybe, and networking, or other things. each of those components is effectively it's own engine, but used in conjunction with each other, it's a game engine.

So if you want to program a game engine, theres probably two things you can do.

1. plan out the design of your engine beforehand, write it from the bottom up
^--- probably the better way.

2. Write the most visible and interactive modules first (player objects and rendering) so that you can begin testing right away, and work your way through everything else.
^--- what I generally do, because im a masochist 0_0. kidding..

Reading some books about the fundamentals of game programming, most notably game DESIGN will help you in this area. ALL succesful games, commercial or otherwise, were planned thoroughly before any coding took place. This is just an assumption on my part, but it's probably safe to say that its true.