[gameprogrammer] Re: [gameprogrammer]

[David Olofson <david@olofson.net>]

On Sunday 06 January 2008, ®£$ǖ"v@M$Ħ ¢© $. wrote:
> I have a question which i had asked a long time ago but failed to
> receive a reply.... Well here it is:
> 
> Why would any one use C++ instead of a game engine.... To make a
> sphere in a game engine you can just write CreateSphere or somehting
> like that... But in C++ we would have to write hundreds  of lines of
> code....????

Wasn't this discussed here just recently - or was that some other 
list...?

Anyway, there are various reasons for that, including performance and 
control.

An engine does what it does, and that's it. If you write your own 
engine over the lower level APIs, you can tune it carefully to 
perform well in your particular application (indoor vs outdoor, high 
polycount heavy vs heavy pixel blending etc), and you can implement 
special effects and features that aren't supported by any "standard" 
engines.

It can also be a learning experience. If you're serious about game 
programming, you should somehow acquire a solid understanding of 
what's going on inside 3D accelerators, 3D engines etc - and a good 
way of doing that is the usual learning by doing. Implement a 
software rasterizer to understand basic texture filtering, blending, 
culling, clipping etc. Implement a 3D engine to understand 
transforms, animation, scene and object management and all that.

Understanding how these things work allows you to make better use of 
existing engines, even if you never write your own production engine. 
It also gives you a fair chance of successfully modifying an existing 
engine, if need be. Many games use modified versions of various 
licensed engines - so obviously, there is often a need for engine 
programmers on a team even for games based on existing engines.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.-------  http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples  -------.
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