   what is a game engine?????
  guys could you tell me what a game engine is IN DETAIL ....pls tell me by step by step how a game can be made using a game engine........pls tell me some description abt each step since I am a newbie.....   
  Google's your friend...   ;  And be sure to check out the Enginuity series;  Hi,Looking from your profile I see you are very new to game programming. A game engine is a software library. This library groups algorithms which take care of some or many low level taks in games:- graphics library initiation- resource loading (music, 3d models, sprites, ...)- game object interaction,- ...See the game engine as a tool to help you focus on your primary goal: make a game. Since it is a tool, you will need to select the best tool for your goal knowing your programming capabilities.A good place to search for game engines is to browse the stickied post List of libraries in the forum Alternative Game Libraries on Gamedev.Ghostly yours,Red.;Quote:And be sure to check out the Enginuity seriesWell sure, if you want to shoot yourself in the foot.   ;  If you are as new as i think you are, you need a solid understanding in c++ first. I suggest begginning c++ through programming 2nd edition.I suggest you do this before you even think about building or using a c++ game engine. You will just spend all your time in forums asking questions and wondering why things don't work.If this is not the case and you are migrating from c++ console programming to game programming, and are looking for a game engine, i would personally sugest looking at irrlitch and ogre.If you are new to programming and still really want to write games then i suppose Dark GDK by the Game Creators is a good idea. You learn c++ and how it works, you get all the benifits of c++ with little downside, well for beginners, although Dark GDK does not have enough performance for next gen type games or loads of polygons, but basic game functionality can be implemented.Building a game engine can be quite hard, lots of stuff needs to be implemented and as a beginner, code can get messy and incomprihensible.But if you really want to know how to build one here are the dead basics:1. Choose some way your gunna render stuff e.g. directx or opengl rendering/graphics.2. Support the import af a mesh file format (directx 9 can auto import un animated .x meshes).2a. Load animation, textures, mesh, etc.2b. Attually render these files and advance animation.3. Create physics stuff, e.g. collison4. Networking stuff5. Shaders6. etc, the list is really quite endless, e.g. support for other formats, lights, etc.I suggest that you keep your code object oriented, so you can plug in bits of code and rewrite other bits without majorly affecting oter compoinets of your game engine. A list of endless functions, will end up with you getting supper frustrated, won't work and will be impossible to use.Keep in mind that all these tasks can take months to do and all have to be rigoroulsy tested to insure they all work.I would really suggest using a pre built one, or is really new to programming Dark Basic GDK.Hope that helpsPureBlackSin;Quote:Original post by SpoonbenderQuote:And be sure to check out the Enginuity seriesWell sure, if you want to shoot yourself in the foot.Well, it explains what a game engine is in detail.   ;  @Red Ghost - So basically a game engine is unfinished code? Like all the hard coding done for you already so you can focus on the front end stuff like Gameplay, Story etc etc??   ;  "Unfinished code"? I guess you could remotely describe it that way. But not in the sense of a fill-in-the-blanks game scaffolding that you need to complete.We programmers are lazy people. For example if we need to load a JPG, we're not keen on learning how JPEG compression works and spending weeks to create a loader. We just reuse the code written by someone else (or by ourselves in the past).A game engine is very much like that, only that it usually has a larger scope. It will typically free us of menial tasks such as initializing DirectX or OpenGL to get access to the graphics card, calculating the position of a character's arms depending on its current animation state, drawing only things potentially visible on the screen so no time is wasted with parts of the level the player can't see and so on.As an analogy, you also don't think of a car as an unfinished trip. A car is just a tool for you to make trips. And you can reuse it between different trips. You also don't need to modify or rebuild the car depending on what kind of trip you plan on doing. It's built in a generic way and has a lean interface (weel, pedals, shifter, key) you can operate without knowing all the technical details. You can even replace the car without too much effort since other cars likely have very similar interfaces.All of this holds true for a library or engine as well. You don't modify the game engine to become your game, you use it in your game. Apart from saving us lots of time, we can reuse such an engine for multiple projects. That will not only save us a lot of work in future games we create, but some engines (like aforementioned Ogre and Irrlicht) are used by so many people that bugs have virtually no chance not to be noted by someone eventually.