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Well hello everyone just thought id give a update. After talking to VarmintTheRat we came to a discussion about what my engine will have and he made a valid point. I do not have a strong reference considering Ive only used my own engines or other indie developers engines. So im going to take about 2 months from working on the engine to experiment and create things with professional engines. These will include Unity,Unreal,Torque among others. Ill try to use as many engines as i can to get a feel for how i should do my own. Now don’t get mad im not abandoning DTE im just trying to do everything it takes to make it the best i can and if that means using other engines so be it.

Well hello everyone! Sadly I still haven’t heard any word from the professor and well sadly I think I never will. But that does not make me feel like I wasted my time. In fact it opened my eyes to a lot of things. One of which was design flaws in my engine. Now I didn’t find them at first due to the fact it worked for me very well so why would I try to find them. But I had a friend of mine who goes by VarmintTheRat take a look at the engine and in one line he told me what he needed to. The line was “This needs to be rewritten.” So he told me the flaws etc and I agreed with everything he had to point them out but as soon as he did I was confident that he was correct so the redesign started to go underway. Now I will be recoding the new engine from scratch. Most of you are probably screaming right now but hear me out. I did rush the previous engine due to time constraint. Thus a lot of things were over looked like proper error checking and const use. Among other things the engine had issues such as it requiring a nice high end machine to run at anything playable.

Another issue was the actually api implementations they weren’t as easily changeable as I once thought. So these issues I mention are enough to convince me to do a rewrite. Now huge change will be the api’s being used as the default for the engine. I plan to make these truly interchangeable using interfaces that interact with implementations. Now the api’s that are going to be used are as followed.

OpenSceneGraph: For 3d and 2d rendering
Nvidia Physx: For physics simulation
OIS : For keyboard input and mouse
AngelScript / Mono: For Scripting *this is still undecided*
RakNet: For networking
cAudio: For 3d Audio

Now if you’re curious why I dropped Irrlicht and irrKlang it’s not because I don’t like them but simply I need to expand my abilities to other apis. I have to be able to do anything in any api if I ever plan to make it in the industry. The challenge OpenSceneGraph gives me is that there irc channel is practically dead and the forum isn’t beginner friendly. I will be relying on docs, tutorials and sample code just as I would if I was in the industry. Has you know I am one to challenge myself and well this is just another challenge.

As for the engine design I will be attempting a parallel game engine. In short it’s a multithreaded game engine with data synchronization only were needed. Most of the api’s I use are already threaded so I just need to thread the engine itself rather than modifying the api’s. I’ve only done minor threading in QT so this should be quite a interesting challenge. If you’re curious on how a parallel game engine works here is a link to the doc I will be using has a base design: Design Link

Finally for this engine I will be trying to be as professional has I can be so I will be making flowcharts, notes, documentation, clean code, among other things on the way I do not have a set due date on this one for I plan on taking the time to do it right. The svn for this project will not be available online. Until I believe it’s usable. As always the code will be free to use and probably be under lgpl.

So it’s all done the basic engine works and the game is doing well. The game even managed to scare a few people so all is good. So that’s a sign it will impress the professor. Now all is done I will now have a interview with my make up interviewer bob..or jim..err whatever you want to call him.

So the game is done how do you feel?
I feel alright I’m glad the frustration and stress is gone but now I got to find my next direction. I have no plans of improving the tech demo but I will be improving the engine.

What would you say was the hardest thing about the project?
For me it would be the math. I had to shove two high school math courses into my head in the span of a few days. I suck at math to begin with so this seemed impossible but with a little help from Halifax and FuzzYspoON I managed to catch on in only 3 days so that was the hardest thing to learn.

On a scale from 1-10 how hard was this project?
This was a solid 8 I can’t say 9 or 10 because I finished it. I had to learn a lot more than I thought I did. I thought I was going in with an engine fully capable of what I needed to easily create the game with minimal effort. Problem was I was completely wrong. Many of the engines managers had to be rewritten as well have things being created to work with the game. This wasn’t terribly bad but I was expecting no work on the engine. Also I’ve never made a game before. My whole life I’ve only worked on systems and engines haha so this was one hell of a learning experience.

Was there ever a time you felt you couldn’t complete it?
Actually yes there was a few times were I felt all hope was lost. Most notable was when I broke 3ds max I deleted the obj exporter from it and my exporter worked with obj’s so it was bad. Luckily my friend had a copy and transferred it over to me. Another part was when I couldn’t figure out how to get entity triggers working it was a quick fix I was trying to do it based on position but the fix that fuzzy suggested was checking if a box was inside another. Worked like a charm. Final time was when I got somewhat depressed over issues and I just couldn’t get myself to work. Luckily Yoran managed to snap me out of it and I got back to work.

If you could would you do it again?
Yes and no really. It’s hard to say because the knowledge I gained from doing it was invaluable. Has for the stress and frustration I could do without but this proved to me I could go past my own made up limitations. I also made a lot of good friends over the summer that made it worth it. So I think over all if I had to redo this challenge yes but am I likely to start another one no.

How hard was it to keep yourself programming constantly?
Wasn’t hard at all really that’s all I felt like doing to be honest. I always was talking programming in #irrlicht and it was easy to want to continue. The last few days though it came to a slow pace of programming but I learned it’s better to take a break every now and then rather than force yourself to program actually I think if I had taken more breaks I may have gotten more in confusing I know.

Do you have any advice for new programmers looking to make a game?
Just try if it doesn’t work keep trying if it still doesn’t work ask for help and try again. You won’t complete anything if you quit every time it gets hard. No matter what you’re going to hit a roadblock. Has VarmintTheRat told me when it was crunch time *Saturday* he told me a quote by steve wozniack I believe it stated “Obstacles are only things you see when you look away from your goal”. Or something close to that matter but this helped get me through my last day because its true a obstacle is only a obstacle if you let it get in the way of a goal.

Any last words of wisdom?
You cant learn how to make a game without making one. So cut the bullshit and make something pong tetris or anything small that will get your confidence up. Continue to go up the difficulty level until your making the full 3d game of your dreams.

Hope that q&a explained everything if you have any more questions drop me a comment.