Hi I am working on my Iso3d engine and I am wondering what I should include as "engine" material. right now I have support for sounds,music,and file i/o. I am working on the graphics and networking systems. Question : shoul i include in my engine code support for actors and game entities and also maps and tiles. or should i only put in the basic functions and leave the rest as "game" specific code. If you dont understand what i mean just post and I will try to explain a little better Thanx

What I would do is to think about games. What elements are always shared? These would be graphics, sounds, and everything else you listed. Also, all games have sprites or entities of some kind. If you are doing an object oriented approach, then you could place some generic sprite or entity class in the library that each game could derive from.

Basically, if the game feature is shared among multiple games, then it''s probably a good idea to add it to the engine. Otherwise, you''re probably going to end up doing a bunch of copy and pasting.

Hope this helps!

Josh
http://www.jh-software.com

Yea well i am using the engine for a RTS game so I suppose that the map drawing routines and such should probably be incorporated into the engine. As far as AI and UI that should probably be "game" specific code. Yes I am trying to get it as OO as possible

By the way were are you from in PA i am in Central Pa and know of no one that programs games.

Yes, you''re right. The code for the specific units should not be in the engine. You could however, put in an abstract base class that all units derive from into the engine.

Oh, and I am in Pittsburgh, PA.

Josh
http://www.jh-software.com

When designing a any sort of engine or framework, I would advise that you forget completely about the game your planning to make. Think instead of how many different games you could make with the same engine, jot down all of the similarities, then from that point on narrow your focus to just the engine implementation.

One thing I would do personally is to separate all the sound code from the graphics code.Meaning, build a reusable tile engine AND a reusable sound engine. I would also build a reusable, customizable GUI interface. That way you don''t have to rewrite each portion everytime you want a new type of graphics engine.