The Structure of a Multiplatform Game Engine
Koivisto, Jesse (2025)
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025102826556
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025102826556
Tiivistelmä
The goal of this project was to document and explain the inner workings and platform-independent code of Radium, a 3D game engine developed by myself. The subject was chosen out of personal interest towards the topic, as well as some frustrations with the lack of tangible information on interface design for such a system.
The engine was written in C++, following the C++11 standard. In order to keep the clarity of the code to a maximum, the C++ standard library (the ”std” namespace) was discarded during development, with only the C standard library and a custom set of utility functions used. Some of these classes can be seen in the code snippets, but were chosen to not elaborate on since they fall outside the scope of the paper.
The length of this thesis is somewhat limited, and as such, explores one potential way of developing a portable backend for an engine. The readers of this paper are encouraged to make use of the patterns and terminology used within and explore the potential methodology further on their own. The codebase has 160 000 lines of code, so despite the number of words and code snippets in this paper, the contents had to be very carefully chosen.
While the goals within this paper have been achieved within the engine already, much like all software, the engine isn’t really done until I give up on it. As such, the structure and porting efforts are still ongoing to fit the needs of specific games we want to make using the engine. Some designed components had to be slightly refactored while I was writing this paper. The first game that’s using the engine as its basis is planned to be announced later in 2025.
The engine was written in C++, following the C++11 standard. In order to keep the clarity of the code to a maximum, the C++ standard library (the ”std” namespace) was discarded during development, with only the C standard library and a custom set of utility functions used. Some of these classes can be seen in the code snippets, but were chosen to not elaborate on since they fall outside the scope of the paper.
The length of this thesis is somewhat limited, and as such, explores one potential way of developing a portable backend for an engine. The readers of this paper are encouraged to make use of the patterns and terminology used within and explore the potential methodology further on their own. The codebase has 160 000 lines of code, so despite the number of words and code snippets in this paper, the contents had to be very carefully chosen.
While the goals within this paper have been achieved within the engine already, much like all software, the engine isn’t really done until I give up on it. As such, the structure and porting efforts are still ongoing to fit the needs of specific games we want to make using the engine. Some designed components had to be slightly refactored while I was writing this paper. The first game that’s using the engine as its basis is planned to be announced later in 2025.