You are proper in saying {that a} sport engine is abstracting away from the low degree graphics APIs, however a completely fledged sport engine does much more.
Recreation engines are supposed to make all the things close to sport growth simpler. They do every have their very own distinctive options, however typically they supply simple abstraction layers for graphics, audio, enter, scene administration, collision detection, maths and normal helpful utilities. Some present wrappers and plugins for physics APIs and a few even have some AI assist (largely restricted to FSMs, pathfinding and – the present pattern – behaviour bushes). Numerous them assist, and satisfaction themselves, on cross-platform performance.
A sport engine’s goal is to make it simpler for the person to create a sport, with out having to take care of the small annoyances in making a sport from scratch or having to put in a complete bunch of libraries and writing your personal wrappers for them to fit your sport.
There are numerous engines on the market, however watch out for the distinction between a graphics engine and a video games engine (For instance, Unity could be a video games engine, whereas Ogre could be a graphics engine).
I’ve received two books on the topic, however they supply overview on the topic:
They don’t seem to be too in depth as you would wish a number of books on every part to get the depth of information you’d have to create a full, skilled sport engine, however they clarify the ideas very nicely, I feel.
In the event you’re beginning out sport dev, do not make an engine. I refer you to the next web page: http://geometrian.com/programming/tutorials/write-games-not-engines/
Engines are a tough factor to get proper. In the event you write a load of video games, you will discover you will have numerous reusable code after some time which you need to use to make your personal private engine that can assist you out. And having numerous (full) video games underneath your belt is much more spectacular than a single engine.
Hope that helps.
Ray
