Hi, My first little game is still quite early in its life, and currently I am using SDL + OpenGL rendering. I have only 2d sprites for now, but do not exclude wanting more in the future. Should I invest some time right now to migrate to a real engine or, if I decide to do it later, will this be much more costly ? If there are tricks to make a future migration easier, please let me know (anything more specific than avoiding spreading rendering code all over the place). Thanks for your experience !

Quote:Original post by Hodgman
Once you finish making your game, if there any parts of the code that could possibly be re-used to make a 2nd game, then those parts are your "engine".

<a href=">

@_fastcall: I think he's asking about migrating to a 3rd party engine, not "what defines an engine"

@SriLumpa: If you want to move you game to a "real" engine like Torque, Unreal, whatever the sooner you do it the better. A 3rd party engine will drastically affect how the rest of your game is architected. It will likely not be possible or worth the time to migrate a more finished game to a different engine.

But if you're not talking about 3rd party engine then, honestly, forget about it. Finish your game. When you start the next one you'll rip out the parts of your first game that worked and compose them into a better structure. You'll do this for a few projects before you understand what an engine is. It's not worth the time trying to "keep things clean" right now. In all likely hood you'll finish this project and realize that 90%+ of your code is total crap and you'll want to start again from scratch [smile]

-me

Indeed, I was talking about a third party engine, as I don't feel good enough to create something I could call an "engine". Sorry for not making that clear.

So, I should migrate soon. Do you know of a good engine out there that is:
- simple to integrate for just basic rendering
- c++
- windows/linux
- open source, or free and active

Hum that sounds like a classical question ...
The "simple to integrate" part is important to me though, because I fear that too big non-gameplay work at this early point could demotivate me somehow.

Thanks !

The 2D sprites IMHO are simple enough that you can quickly write the drawing functions yourself and then concentrae on your game. If you are a beginner it could be even easier than learning a full-featured 3rd party engine. I suggest that you should seriously consider getting a real engine once you start wanting more (3D, lighting, shadows, scene management, effects etc).

Quote:Original post by SriLumpa
So, I should migrate soon. Do you know of a good engine out there that is:
- simple to integrate for just basic rendering
- c++
- windows/linux
- open source, or free and active

Take a look at SFML; its free, active, open source, windows/linux (and mac!), and OpenGL even!