You’re proper in saying {that a} recreation engine is abstracting away from the low stage graphics APIs, however a totally fledged recreation engine does much more.

Game engines are supposed to make all the things on the subject of recreation 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 (principally restricted to FSMs, pathfinding and – the present development – behaviour bushes). A whole lot of them assist, and delight themselves, on cross-platform performance.

A recreation engine’s objective is to make it simpler for the person to create a recreation, with out having to take care of the small annoyances in making a recreation from scratch or having to put in a complete bunch of libraries and writing your individual wrappers for them to fit your recreation.

There are quite a lot of engines on the market, however watch out for the distinction between a graphics engine and a video games engine (For instance, Unity can be a video games engine, whereas Ogre can be a graphics engine).

I’ve acquired two books on the topic, however they supply overview on the topic:

They’re not 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 recreation engine, however they clarify the ideas very properly, I feel.

If you are beginning out recreation 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. If you write a load of video games, you may discover you could have quite a lot of reusable code after some time which you should utilize to make your individual private engine that will help you out. And having quite a lot of (full) video games beneath your belt is much more spectacular than a single engine.

Hope that helps.

Ray