Hi all,
I'm a university student in Hanoi, Vietnam, and there is about one year and a half until my graduation day. My plan for graduation project is clear: make a game engine for Linux based system, since Linux has received many positive attraction for gaming now (games for Linux on Steam are more and more, Unreal Engine and Unity Engine have their Linux-port version - although it's not officially).
I chose Ogre as my rendering engine, because writing a complete new rendering engine is a hard and somehow redundant work. Also, I want to concentrate on features that a game developer can use to make his game, and rendering is just one of those features. Furthermore, Ogre was originally developed with Linux, so I think it would be a nice choice. And lastly, Ogre has many plugins, which makes it almost becomes a game engine.
I really like the design of Unity Engine - they focus on easy-to-use ability. For Unreal, it is so fucking powerful but very hard to understand because it's too large (and it requires a beast PC as well). The aim of the project is to combine two approaches: easy-to-use (from Unity), and powerful (from Unreal). I know, this is not an easy work, especially I'm working alone (comparing with Unity and Unreal Engine, they both have a big companies and most intelligent brains behind them). But I will try my best.
I will post my problems and issues here, hopefully you will support me. Every help will be appreciate.
p/s: maybe some of my questions (or maybe, all of them) are stupid, because I'm an inexperience developer. Please, be patient with me.
Regards,
Idea about game engine for Linux
So you want to make an engine and an editor? That's a lot of work for a school project so better scope it well. I'd suggest using Qt for the editor.
So you want to make an engine and an editor? That's a lot of work for a school project so better scope it well. I'd suggest using Qt for the editor.
Actually I'm using the QT Creator as the IDE, one of the reasons is I can create an editor quite easily with it.
Yeah, I know that is a lot of work here, and nothing will guarantee that I'll be successful. But I need to do this. And sometimes failures give more motivation than success. :D
By the way, I have a problem now, I will post it there tomorrow. Let's start working....
Why not help improve an existing engine rather than trying to create yet another engine? Urho3D comes to mind...
Works like a charm on Linux.
Although I wouldn't be opposed to seeing more alternatives :)
Good luck!
Why not help improve an existing engine rather than trying to create yet another engine? Urho3D comes to mind...
It's my graduation project, so I think I will do something is actually mine.
also check out http://www.godotengine.org/projects/godot-engine
Works like a charm on Linux.
Although I wouldn't be opposed to seeing more alternatives
Good luck!
Thanks. Looks great, would be a nice reference for me :D
there is about one year and a half until my graduation day. My plan for graduation project is clear .. this is not an easy work, especially I'm working alone
While I appreciate what you want to do, you need a serious reality check.
You are likely to find time for 500 or 1000 hours of effort to your project. The normal scale for comparing work is FTE ("Full Time Equivalent"), which is about 40 hours of week for a full year. You are most likely going to spend 0.25 FTE on your project, maybe even as high as 0.5 FTE if you work on it extensively but few students invest that kind of time on projects.
The projects you list as comparable are not small. They have development teams from tens of people to hundreds of people and required multiple years. They are on the scale of hundreds or thousands of FTE hours.
You have about 0.25 FTE available for your project. If you expect the same results as a 2000 FTE project, success is unlikely.
I know that there will be a tough works waiting for me.
At this time, I'm still struggling about making the design which is independent on the background - Ogre. I need to do this, because when I want to change the background (maybe the newer version of Ogre, or a whole new 3D rendering engine, or an additional 2D graphics library...), the interface that I provide for my users won't be change so much.
I know that there will be a tough works waiting for me.
At this time, I'm still struggling about making the design which is independent on the background - Ogre. I need to do this, because when I want to change the background (maybe the newer version of Ogre, or a whole new 3D rendering engine, or an additional 2D graphics library...), the interface that I provide for my users won't be change so much.
Not only is it going to be tough work. Its probably not a good idea for a degree project. There is very little to be gained from writing a games engines. Most of your marks for a degree project will be gained from the write up you do about the project. Creating a games engine is not something that is new or original and there is very little academic merit gained from plugging a few open source components together and creating a QT editor.
If you are focussed on Linux you might be better doing a feasibility study on using the most popular Linux games engines (Unity, UT and Godot). Just create a mini game that you can reimplement in all three engines and then do a write up of the differences in performance, ease of use etc.. It doesn't sound as technical but it is likely to gain you a much better grade than spending your time righting a complete engine.
Or follow TheComets advice and improve or modify an existing engine. For example you could take Godot and replace its renderer with a real time raytracer.
If you want to write an engine then keep it as a hobby project. For your degree look at where your marks are going to be achieved.
there is about one year and a half until my graduation day. My plan for graduation project is clear .. this is not an easy work, especially I'm working aloneWhile I appreciate what you want to do, you need a serious reality check.
You are likely to find time for 500 or 1000 hours of effort to your project. The normal scale for comparing work is FTE ("Full Time Equivalent"), which is about 40 hours of week for a full year. You are most likely going to spend 0.25 FTE on your project, maybe even as high as 0.5 FTE if you work on it extensively but few students invest that kind of time on projects.
The projects you list as comparable are not small. They have development teams from tens of people to hundreds of people and required multiple years. They are on the scale of hundreds or thousands of FTE hours.
You have about 0.25 FTE available for your project. If you expect the same results as a 2000 FTE project, success is unlikely.
Sorry for a quick OT:
Funnies aside, I have a smallish engine I've been working on. For 7-8 years now. It started out aimless like most beginner projects and while there have been (literally) countless times when I've gotten sidetracked, the learning curve related to relevant topics has still amounted to well into thousands of hours of time that I've spent reading, planning, writing code, fixing mistakes, replanning and rewriting code.
I would hope that if I started from scratch now, I could accomplish something tangible in a year and a half, but this owes a lot to the experience I've accumulated over these 8 years. There are innumerable things I would do differently that would allow me to avoid rewriting large portions of code many times, simply because I've run into unforeseeable complications down the line. If I had ever worked on an actual professional game, I could likely have avoided a lot of dabbling in voodoo and cleaning up after misplaced assumptions. But I didn't have that privilege and I've paid for it with time.
That being said, I wholeheartedly support the idea of working on your own engine. I personally love it, because once you nail something down, it's positively awesomely rewarding in the bestest possible way. And more importantly, it's yours.
Just be sure to have a goal (an actual game you want to finish) and start with something small. Start with a fully modular implementation of Pong. Treat it like a miniature open world top-down 3D FPS with a fixed camera, two walls, three dynamic actors and no guns. From personal experience - once I realized that if I wanted to do everything the way it would be done in a modern engine, I found myself diving headlong into collision response between fast-moving dynamic bodies. This alone sent me straight back to square one. GJK, SAT, Minkowski space, etc. It was a can of worms I never even knew existed. Yet in the grand scheme of things it was but one of many many roadblocks that tackled me while I though it would be the other way around. The truth is, everyone gets suckered into game development thinking it's the other way around.
The thought I want to convey with the above example is that writing an engine per se is not a very good idea. But if you put together a framework that can run Pong from a couple of pages of Lua script attached to your main engine, you'll find that you can suddenly do so much more with it.