Hi everyone, I apologise in advance if this question has been answered somewhere else, but I had trouble finding what I was looking for. Essentially, I'm looking to build a good reusable Engine for a few projects of mine. The problem is, I'm unsure of how to go about separating the Engine code from the game code itself. I'm familiar with all the basic aspects of game design, DirectX/OpenGL, Audio, Input handling and so on but the best I can manage is to just have these components in separate header files that I can include in a project. I know there must be a better way of doing this, perhaps by compiling the engine as a library and linking that to other projects, but that's what I'm having trouble working out. I've never written a library or DLL or anything like that, so I'm not sure where to begin, or if that's even the right way to go. I keep searching for articles on separating an engine from game code, but invariably keep finding tutorials on building OpenGL engines and such, which isn't quite what I'm after. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

It depends what your engine should be capable to do. you could start by making a new folder called "engine" and add all the classes you would need to complete each of your games, e.g:

#include "InputAudioGraphics.h"class Engine {    Engine();    bool start();    bool render();    bool keyIsDown(int key);};

Then make a new folder for your game and don't add any header files from your game into your engine.

Yeah, that's sort of what I'm doing at the moment, but as I said I believe there must be a better way of doing it.

Thanks, Wizecoder, that almost seems to be what I'm looking for.
Could you possibly expand a little on part 2? You give a good description on what to do, but you don't really give reasons as to why you should do it. You also seem to assume that the reader knows all about DLLs, how to access them and such which is the bit I'm kind of struggling with. Perhaps that is to come in part 3?
Thanks again, I think you've helped me on the right track so far.