Review: OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook by Ilya Grinblat & Alex Peterson was, I guess, what it advertised itself as; a quick cookbook of recipes using OGRE. What is was not was a good inspection of the OGRE engine itself. Really what the book amounted to was a series of short chapters, each tackling a specific programming problem. While there is nothing wrong with

Review: Game Engine Design and Implementation by Alan Thorn

Alan Thorn’s Game Engine Design and Implementation was quite an interesting read. Overall I thought it was good, but the book struggles at times to find it’s audience. On one hand, it covers a lot of great topics and there are some good code snippets to be found. On the other hand, it seems to jump around between APIs and frameworks and never really

Review: Getting Started with UDK

Right off the bat, I knew this was not going to be an in-depth resource. The book weighs in and a light 120 pages, though the title does say “getting started” so I least they were upfront about it. That said, I did find the book useful and feel it was a good intro text for people unfamiliar with UDK. Getting Started with

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 6)

It’s been quite a while since my last 3D game engine post, but I haven’t forgot about it. In fact, I’ve been so heads-down in research I haven’t really done any development at all. I still feel like there are a few more books I will need to read to be better prepared, but I guess that will always be the case. So

Review: 3D Game Engine Programming

The quest to become a master of 3D engines has brought me to another book, 3D Game Engine Programming by Stefan Zerbst (with a forward from the legendary Andre LaMothe). This is one of the first books I’ve read in a while that wasn’t available on the Kindle, and it’s out of print, but I managed to find a used copy of the

Review: 3D Game Engine Architecture

In preparation for my 3D game engine, I have been trying to read all I can on 3D engine design and architecture. Although there are some good books out there, it’s very difficult to find a text that will walk you through everything you need to know. That said, 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic by David H. Eberly gives it

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 5)

So far I have mostly been talking about plans and theories, not much meat. Today I hope to remedy that with a discussion on main loops. Surely there are tons of different ways a main game loop can function, and I will explain a few of those methods. Keep in mind, I am still developing the architecture for this engine, so anything can

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 4)

So now we should have a good idea of why you’d want to create a 3D engine, and what kind of components make up the engine. Up next we will look at some of the tools and APIs necessary to actually compose the software. Keep in mind that the choices I am making are not necessarily the optimal choices for all situations. In

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 3)

Last time I recommended some good books for engine creation. Today I will talk a little bit more about what an engine actually is, since it’s rather silly to try to create something that is undefined. What I am defining a 3D game engine as is “a framework or set of tools that abstracts complexity and enables creation of real-time 3D experiences.”  It’s

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 2)

With the first part of this series I have listed a few motivating reasons for developing a 3D game engine in the first place. In this next part I will go deeper into some of the research I have been doing for amassing the skills I feel are necessary to actually complete a project like this. As I have mentioned, one of the