Is there a pedagogical game engine?
- by K.G.
I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems.
I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point!
I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered.
There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows:
float Q_rsqrt( float number )
{
long i;
float x2, y;
const float threehalfs = 1.5F;
x2 = number * 0.5F;
y = number;
i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking
i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***?
y = * ( float * ) &i;
y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration
// y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed
return y;
}
To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read.
In summary, here's my white whale:
For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?"
In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection.
Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL.
Thanks for everything!
Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!
