4 replies to this topic

[bazso]

Is there some kind of book out there that explains what gaming engine abilities or features are and what they do?

I will show what I mean

Rendering engine

Adaptive Binary Tree (ABT) scene manager, up to 100,000 entities per scene

Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) / Potential Visibility Set (PVS) (Pro Edition)

Indoor and outdoor support, seamless LOD terrain renderer

Light manager for unlimited point and spot light sources

Static and dynamic shadows

Fog areas, Camera portals, reflections and mirrors

Geometric LOD, detail textures, texture compression

Softskin models with multiple shaders; bones, vertex, and morph animation

Animated sprites and decals

Material properties for static and dynamic objects

Multiple cameras and render views, multiple monitors, widescreen support


PARTICLE & EFFECT Engine

Programmable particle generators for multiple particle types

Beam generators for laser beams and tracer paths

Pre- and postprocessing shaders, supporting shader models 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

HLSL shader language, FX file support

Per pixel lighting, bump and environment mapping, multitexturing

Layered sky system with sky cubes, sky domes, clouds and backdrop bitmaps

Dynamic decal system for bullet holes, foot prints, tire marks etc.

Programmable effects like lens flares, distortion, fisheye, etc.

Shader workshop and Shader viewer

More than 40 included shaders: cartoon, environment, gooch, bump, lambert, blinn, phong, parallax, occlusion, wind animation, mirror, water, blur, bloom, dilate, displacements, erode, bleach, sepia, emboss, posterize, lens, and many more effects


Physics & Collision Engine

Polygon level collision detection

Physics objects with gravity, damping, elasticity, friction

Hinge, ball, wheel, and slider joints with motors

Water physics with dynamic wave generation (Pro Edition)

Arbitrary axis rotations for space and flight simulators

Bezier path tracking for camera, actors or vehicles

Mouse picking and manipulating of 3D objects

Slow motion / quick motion effect


2D Engine

Multi-layer system

Animated 3D and 2D sprites

Movie player for rendering videos fullscreen and on textures

GUI panels with various button, slider, display and window types

Truetype and bitmap fonts

Screenshot generator


Sound Engine

Static and dynamic 3D sound sources with Doppler effect

Multichannel streaming sound player

WAV, OGG, MID, MP3, WMA, CD support


Network & Game Engine

Save / Load system for resuming games at arbitrary positions

Easy, tranparent client/server mode for LAN and Internet (UDP)

Multizone/multiserver support, MMOG capable (Pro Edition)

Expandable through DLL plugins

Input devices: Mouse, Keyboard, Joystick / Racewheel, SpaceNavigator®, WiiMote®


These are the abilities for the engine I have chosen but I don’t understand what they truly mean and do it is my fault for choosing a engine I have no intelligence to under stand what it can do only reason why I chosen it is because it looked like it have a lot of promising abilities to start out with.

[rouncer]

You might need more than one book for all that, some of the stuff listed you could probably work out on your own.
Maybe instead of reading about it ALL before you start, you could just start writing code now and see what you can work out yourself.

For example, if you want to use DLLs, "loadlibrary" is the function you use to link during runtime, but theres a little more to it than that, but actually it might as well be that easy.

Theres a lot of stuff there, alot of books could help you.

Id probably suggest getting a broad general beginners "making a game with windows" type book, cause thatll solve a lot of your problems, then you could go from there and buy some more specific graphics books like the "shader x" series, which is good - but it doesnt tell you how to do anything EXCEPT graphics. (with realtime shaders)

And of course theres always the option to use a pre made engine, and they should come with documentation about how to use them, so you could sit in the docs for your engine for a long time clueing stuff out.

After everything ive said, id probably suggest using an engine, because the difficulty level is lowered a little bit, sure you wont know how to pull a game out WITHOUT the engine, but youll sure know how to use the engine to make a game, and thats nearly as good.

If you pick an engine and start experimenting with it, im sure its pretty ok for you to post questions here about it to other users of the engine, people can help a little, but dont expect too much, no-ones gonna come round your house and do it all for you.

[bazso]

Thank you for your advice I will go do that.

[poita]

Jargon isn't really something you can learn from a book. It's just something that you'll pick up from reading on forums, reading tutorials, reading articles etc.

[Sol_HSA]

http://realtimerendering.com/