Create Your Own 3D Game Engine

"So, in this series of articles, I'm going to do my level best to teach you how to build an engine, from scratch. I'm not just going to present you with code and say 'call function X to do funky things;' by the end of this series, you're not just going to have an engine - you're going to understand it. So listen up, maggot!"

"It's important to realize that in practical terms, an engine can't do *everything* - the more things the engine has to support, the more low-level it becomes, until you're just writing a wrapper for DirectX/OpenGL. No, when you write an engine, you have to lay down some rules about what games can build on it - you can't build Doom 3 on the Half-Life engine, for example, because Doom 3 requires some things (like per-pixel lighting) that the Half-Life engine simply doesn't provide. More obviously, you couldn't use the HL engine if you were planning a game for GameCube, because HL doesn't support the platform."