Question

I am thinking of making a simple game engine for my course final year project. I want it to be modular and expandable so that I can add new parts if I have time. For example I would make a graphics engine that would be completely independent of the other systems, once that was finished I could add a physics engine etc.
I would also want to make a tool set to go with this engine. For the tools I would like to use C# but I am not sure about the libraries. My question is, if I want a C# GUI program, can I reference a library written in C++? Also would there be any performance problems etc. if I made some of the libraries in C# but wanted to use them from a C++ game.

I would like to avoid C++ as much as possible, my experiences have shown that development time can be a lot higher for a project over that of using C# or Java etc. My graphics development would be in OpenGL, this is all I have been taught. We have only done this in C++ but I have seen that projects such as SharpGL allow for the development with C#. Is there any performance issues with this. I am not looking for a blindingly fast, top graphics game. It will most likely be something simple to show my engine working. My engine probably won’t be that great either as I only have a year and am working on my own.

Any advice on this would be appreciated. I am still really in the planning stages so it wouldn’t be too much work to completely change what I want to do. I would just like to preempt any major problems I might have.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you can pull this off even under a relaxed set of goals, you’re set for a great project. First, you need to get a grasp of scope:

• How long do you have to work on the project?
• How many people are working on the project?
• If you can only create one “piece of the pie” on your own, which one would you pick? Use this to establish a working plan to make sure if you don’t get as far as you’d like, you still have enough to make the work show as a great project.

A game engine is a big development task. A game engine with a toolchain is an enormous development task. In a lot of ways, choosing a smaller but more challenging task is preferable because it shows higher-level thinking about problem solving, which is greatly preferred by academics – double that if you are CS and not [Area of] Engineering. Since you are working in managed languages, things you may want to consider are:

• Expressing gameplay logic (rules of the game) in a clean manner so as to provide an efficient and reliable path from designer->developer->tester. If you want, this could absolutely include the manner in which you describe the rules (Custom editor? Code API? DSL?)
• Game AI has no shortage of extremely challenging problems.
• Physics and graphics are interesting and I believe managed languages will eventually be used in these areas, but you may find yourself a bit more limited in your ability to solve these problems. If I were going to work in this area now, I would be trying to answer: “If I could use a managed language for writing [graphics|physics] code without hurting performance, what kinds of [language|runtime] features make the most difference in improving the expressiveness, correctness, maintainability, and reliability of the resulting programs.” This goes way past simply having garbage collection and pointer safety.