Hi guys,

I’m a game programming student with a strong interest in engine programming. So far, I’ve worked through the learnopengl.com tutorials and completed a few OpenGL projects. For an end-of-year project, I built what I call a game engine in six weeks (though, to be honest, it’s more of a basic OpenGL renderer in which you can move the cam, move entities, add lights and stuff). A few months have passed and while I’m proud of it, it was rushed, and revisiting it now feels frustrating. I see many poor design choices, copied code I didn’t fully understand, and unnecessary features. I had no clear direction while making it. I was just following tutorials and adding random features.

I want to keep improving, but I’m at a crossroads and would love some guidance.

• Should I rewrite my renderer to clean up the mistakes and build a stronger foundation?
• Should I start a new project, perhaps something more focused, like creating a game-specific engine (e.g., a Minecraft clone)?
• Should I learn a different graphics API, like DirectX or Vulkan? Would that make me more valuable in the job market?
• Should I explore other components of engine development, like building a physics engine?

I’m looking for something manageable in scope that will still teach me valuable skills. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! What would you do ?

Thanks !!

I’m pretty inexperienced when it comes to debugging i do the absolute basic like print statements and break points (even that I don’t fully understand what I’m looking for besides being able to step through code) so I’m just curious like what tools and things should I look out for when debugging code? And not even just when there’s errors, but checking how performant something is (I think this is what profiling is?) and also checking memory(?) usage which I think is probably important although thats probably not what it’s called. I’m using Visual Studio which I know has tools not sure if it has everything or if there are external tools that people use.

Hi, i want to make a 3d game with "old school" graphics (like ps1), i already started but i want to switch from godot and use raylib or SDL. What do you recommend between raylib and SDL (i think you can also use SDL as raylib backend). What do i need to study to do a game engine with a simple editor? Should i start with 2d (i already made some 2d game projects but never finished except very simple games)? A good book that explains all math you can need for a game engine? I need to do things like procedural generation. I never wrote a shader, where should i start? How much time do you think can take this? Any good open source project i can study for this (better in C)? I know that are a lot of questions, thanks to anyone that answer. I have experience with rust (bevy and macroquad) and godot but it's 2 years that i start projects that i never finish actually.

I'm total beginner when it comes to engine programming and i have a question about the architecture. What is exacly a game engine? From what i've come to understand an engine can be treated as a static or dynamic library which can't run by itself but it's beeing used by editor application and game application. If I click on play button in Unity , does it mean that Unity editor somehow creates and run a temporary game instance? Did I get it right? You guys recomended me to read Game Engine Architecture Book but it's really knowledge heavy, tackling all the details such as memory management. I really want to have a basic understanding first before i deep dive into this book.(I have adhd and i really want to start doing some projects). I would appreciate some code snippets and article references.

I have strong foundations in cpp and dynamics , From where I can start ?

Also , What is the minimum time that is supposed to take to finish it ?

How would you guys implement a feedback control system that takes the game resolution level as the input and the memory usage as the output? The idea is the "manage" the memory consumption of a game so that it does not exceed any given limits.

I really wanna create my own custom game engine from scratch, I just don't know how to start. I've prior experience with sdl2 library.

Any kind peeps here willing to give a roadmap to this newbie??

I’ve been working on nCine, my 2D cross-platform game framework, since June 2011, without taking any breaks. It supports C++ and Lua, making it flexible for developers of varying skill levels.

In late 2024, I focused on enhancing Lua integration to lower the entry barrier for game developers.

This month, I plan to attend the Global Game Jam in my city to create a game and help spread the word about my project.

Are there others here who have been working on a custom engine or framework for this long? Do you have active users developing games with it? What challenges have you faced in building a community around your project? And what are your plans for 2025 to reach more people?

If you’re curious, you can check out nCine here: https://ncine.github.io

Hello! I'm currently setting up an SDL project and wanted to use Lua to some extent. However, I'm having issues including Sol in the project. I haven't had problems with any of the other libraries I'm using, just Sol-Lua specifically. I've included the appropriate Include and Library paths. If you have any experience with this library, could you help me figure out what I could be doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

https://preview.redd.it/6xccupiqtkbe1.jpg?width=690&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bfb4ed9972478dff87eff0d937812cc1ae960c46

https://preview.redd.it/ob7bspiqtkbe1.jpg?width=382&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de93af5063745d80ce441824d3687edce65caa4f

https://preview.redd.it/gaj84riqtkbe1.jpg?width=387&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=41207f7d64fa33ba55d2540ae8704f9c31ae5441

https://preview.redd.it/nhvz1riqtkbe1.jpg?width=470&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4854db036f9fc989fb7b585671eec7f79ae72ff6

I'm building a game engine with a friend. First serious attempt at an engine for either of us, but I've dabbled with various systems before and so has he.

When it comes to entity/scene management however I only really know/understand the scene graph/tree approach.

For our use case I'm not sure it'd be the right choice. So I wanted to open up a discussion about different scene & entity management systems. What have you implemented? What are the benefits? Draw backs? Why did you choose the system you did etc. Do you have a special use case that made you pick a specific approach?

The more niche and weird the better. I just want to see what's out there. Thanks.

So, when it comes to the "connecting entities to the rendering system" part of the game engine, how is this done?

Does the rendering manager just loop through all existing entities by querying the entity manager and check if they have a model pointer != nullptr, then draw that? Or instead does the renderer have its own "entity" equivalent (idk, "RenderObject", contains mesh + transform matrix) that it keeps a list of and entities can ask it to create one, then keep a handle to that render object which they can set the position of etc...

What happens when we want to add e.g a particle system which doesn't use the same rendering code as a regular PBR model? Surely we can't keep creating more and more lists inside the rendering manager for RenderObjects, ParticleSystems, whatever else (Water?)

im going for a simple 2d engine, capable of rendering images/spritesheets, getting input, playing audio, etc. but i want to know if i should code it in python since thats the language im best at. should i use python to make my engine or should i learn another language like java, c/c++ or something else?

I want to generate one frame of the last of us at the max possible quality, all settings set to ultra, to basically get a high quality image for a poster

Obv my hardware just can't run the game at those settings...

I’m developing a multiplayer, cross-platform, mod-friendly sandbox survival game with player hosted servers. My goal is for a single server (costing ~$50-60/month) to support at least 100 players with minimal desync or server-side performance issues. The game features extensive mechanics like crafting, vehicles, farming, weather systems, and large-scale NPC interactions (e.g., 100,000+ NPCs with dynamic behavior).

Context:

I’ve spent the last two years documenting the game’s mechanics and systems. To test the market, I plan to first release a smaller, standalone "horde base defense" game (with a subset of the mechanics) using Unity. However, for the main game, I’ve realized that existing game engines may not be the best fit due to performance limitations and feature bloat.

In particular:

• Unreal seems overkill for my needs and lacks ECS.
• Unity DOTS initially seemed promising, but after seeing benchmarks comparing DOTS to custom-built solutions (C++/OpenGL), the performance gap was stark. The custom solution vastly outperformed DOTS, even without ECS libraries, though at the cost of higher development effort (e.g., implementing features like shadows, lighting, and animations from scratch). https://youtu.be/tInaI3pU19Y

My Plan:

I’m leaning toward building a custom engine for the main game, leveraging existing libraries and frameworks where possible. The smaller base defense game made in Unity will serve as a stepping stone, allowing me to refine systems and potentially secure funding to hire a team for the custom engine.

Key Requirements:

Here are the core features/mechanics my engine must support:

1. Multiplayer (co-op and large-scale community servers)
   
2. Singleplayer
   
3. 3D (isometric view)
   
4. Data-oriented architecture
   
5. Crafting and building systems
   
6. Weather, time, and date systems
   
7. Farming mechanics
   
8. Inventory and loot systems
   
9. Procedural loot spawning on a fixed map
   
10. Procedural "scene" spawning on a fixed map
    
11. NPC AI: Mutants (triggered out of idle by player’s proximity, sound, sight)
    
12. NPC AI: Non-mutants (traders, factions, bandits)
    
13. Vehicles with maintenance systems
    
14. Combat (PvE and PvP)
    
15. Modding support (Lua scripting)
    
16. Cross-platform support (Windows, Mac, Linux and potentially consoles in the future)

I’m exploring C++ frameworks and libraries for graphics, physics, networking, and ECS. Given the requirements above, I’d love to hear recommendations from experienced game engineers. Which libraries or tools would you suggest to minimize development overhead while maximizing performance? Any tips on architecture or workflow for a project of this scale would also be appreciated.

Hi everyone 👋

I would like to make an editor for the existing multi-platform engine, particularly talking about Axmol engine

I would like to use ImGui and maybe json or binary serialisation for the scene and the components.

Any good resources where should i start from?

Thanks!

I’m pretty sure most if not all engines with an editor have a camera for moving around the scene view, but they typically also have a camera that can be added to the scene which can be scripted and used for the game. My question is if these would be the same cameras or separate? Since they’re both cameras there’s probably going to be a lot of overlap so it sort of makes sense that they’d be the same, but I feel like they’re used differently how would you manage the differences?