Is your engine modularized into DLLs? (Poll)
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I'm curious how many people here writing their game engines are actually modularizing their engine, such as having the renderer in a separate DLL that gets loaded at runtime. How is that working out for you?
I currently have my renderer running as a separate module, but am running into continual issues because of the isolation of the renderer from the rest of the engine features, having to bend over backwards to do things that would normally be trivial in a non-modular setup. So I'm interested to hear how this sort of system is working for other people, if you encountered any such integration issues, and how you resolved them in your design.
No, my engine is a single dylib that I drop in. I should probably turn it into a Framework.
I only support one renderer (OpenGL) for the majority of platforms so I don't see much of a reason to modularize it out. I could, but I don't develop primarily on Windows.
I only support one renderer (OpenGL) for the majority of platforms so I don't see much of a reason to modularize it out. I could, but I don't develop primarily on Windows.
I'm building an DLL based engine right now. It all fits together nicely thanks to the .NET framework. I've split my engine into an GUI, Generic Graphics, Engine Specific, and a Managed DirectX 1.1 dll so far.
Basically I defined a bunch of Interfaces/Abstract classes in my generic graphics dll, then in my Managed DirectX 1.1 dll i've been wrapping all of the DirectX stuff up. The worst part is that the wrapping is time consuming. We hope to possibly support both TAO and MDX 1.1 (In the future there maybe XNA support too).
My last project was monolithic and non resuable. This time, I'm setting out to build myself a complete reusable framework for multiple projects.
- Bill
Basically I defined a bunch of Interfaces/Abstract classes in my generic graphics dll, then in my Managed DirectX 1.1 dll i've been wrapping all of the DirectX stuff up. The worst part is that the wrapping is time consuming. We hope to possibly support both TAO and MDX 1.1 (In the future there maybe XNA support too).
My last project was monolithic and non resuable. This time, I'm setting out to build myself a complete reusable framework for multiple projects.
- Bill
Yeah, my engine is in DLLs. Of course I'm working in managed code, so DLL splitting is a trivially simple and clean process that requires little or no extra coding work.
Nope, also one lib here, but I also support multiple renderers. Not as hard as one might think to do it this way. I don't see, for me personally, a reason to go with DLLs. Getting C++ to work nicely with them is not easy unless you're using managed code which we're not.
Multiple DLLs here. The nice thing about the DLLs is that if you know that you have made a mistake somewhere in the middle of one of these DLLs, all you have to do is drop in the newly compiled DLL and, if done properly, everything should run as planned. There are pros and cons to using a DLL over a static Lib. Just depends on what your needs are.
Monolithic .EXE here, aside from a couple of libraries that are loaded as DLLs.
Off topic, I would posit that if you're having difficulty because of splitting your engine into different regions, your design may be suspect. That is, of course, unless you're using C++, which has a masochistically broken compilation/execution model [smile]
Off topic, I would posit that if you're having difficulty because of splitting your engine into different regions, your design may be suspect. That is, of course, unless you're using C++, which has a masochistically broken compilation/execution model [smile]
Out of interest, what is your actual aim in splitting your game up into multiple dlls? Runtime switching of components? Faster compilation times? Something else?
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