What Goes Into Building a 3D Engine?

[BujinZero]

I've done some reading on the ol' internet and haven't found a really good, general explanation. Anyone ever made one? Anyone know of any good links? A solid basic explanation, if possible, will lead to many more specific questions as I and others attempt to understand what a 3D engine is at a basic level. Thanks.

 

[element]

www.gamedev.net

and

nehe.gamedev.net

are your friends

this might help too

 

[drag]

There are a few open source gaming engines you can use to muck around with. They provide source code and samples and should have documentation on it.

I don't know much about it, but there are a few. I am supposing that being able to examine and work with a 3d engine will give you a good idea of what it takes.

http://www.ogre3d.org/
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://crystal.sourceforge.net...tiki-view_articles.php


Also Id has open sourced Doom, Quake1, Quakeworld, Quake2 and will soon open source Quake3. There are quite a few projects that take Quake1 and expand it's capabilities. Some people playing around with it even got some almost Doom3-quality rendering out if (of course very slow compared to Doom3 because, well, aren't as good as programming and optimizing as Id themselves).

A few examples are:
darkplaces
http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/

Tenebrae
http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

Tenebrae 2.0
http://www.tenebrae2.com/

And there are others... Don't know if there are much in the way of quake2 hackers, but I suppose those exist, too.

Tenebrae 2.0 is probably the most impressive looking quake1 mod. (it even uses Quake3-style maps) A work in progress, but it has all the fancy modern graphical stuff.

 

[BujinZero]

Sweet. Thanks.