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Current design decisions for my game engine:

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  • Rieundefined Rie

    The temptation to rush ahead and implement the the fun stuff is real :§ But before that I really gotta make a proof of concept at least for a core architectural system.

    In Godot you have individual .tres / .tscn files for custom resources and scenes. I want to instead use a single SQL database for everything (or at very least for resources like items etc., but ideally also for whole scene hierarchies). That idea needs testing.

    Rieundefined

    Mods would then just be collections of insert / update statements. Upside is you could very easily modify the whole game based on complex parameters, like dimming all light sources in dungeons or changing the stats city guards based on the economic status of the town they're posted in calculated by the wealth of local shopkeepers, in a single SQL statement. No need to touch hundreds of files.

  • Rieundefined Rie

    Mods would then just be collections of insert / update statements. Upside is you could very easily modify the whole game based on complex parameters, like dimming all light sources in dungeons or changing the stats city guards based on the economic status of the town they're posted in calculated by the wealth of local shopkeepers, in a single SQL statement. No need to touch hundreds of files.

    Rieundefined

    Downside is I'm lazy and only want to maintain a single source of truth regarding data structure, so I'm experimenting with automatically generating an SQL table for every data class in my game by analyzing source code (with annotations). Let's see how that goes!

  • Rieundefined Rie

    Downside is I'm lazy and only want to maintain a single source of truth regarding data structure, so I'm experimenting with automatically generating an SQL table for every data class in my game by analyzing source code (with annotations). Let's see how that goes!

    Rieundefined

    Testing it by making a tiny text-based RPG in a separate project first. Depending on how much fun that is it will either stay a tech demo or become something to practice writing as well. Could be like a demo to put on itch to give a preview of the world and its characters.

  • Rieundefined Rie

    Testing it by making a tiny text-based RPG in a separate project first. Depending on how much fun that is it will either stay a tech demo or become something to practice writing as well. Could be like a demo to put on itch to give a preview of the world and its characters.

    Rieundefined

    Slowly hacking away at prototyping a data resource system that's backed by sqlite. Not really sure what I'm doing...

    Currently I have C++ classes representing data which have an equivalent table in the database. The classes have a static getter taking the ID as input. This does a select statememt on the DB, creates an instance of the class, puts it into a pool, and returns a handle to get a reference to the instance.

  • Rieundefined Rie

    Slowly hacking away at prototyping a data resource system that's backed by sqlite. Not really sure what I'm doing...

    Currently I have C++ classes representing data which have an equivalent table in the database. The classes have a static getter taking the ID as input. This does a select statememt on the DB, creates an instance of the class, puts it into a pool, and returns a handle to get a reference to the instance.

    Rieundefined

    I'm wondering how to handle relations between classes / tables. E.g. Actors have an inventory of Items. I know how to represent this on the DB, but on the C++ side I need to replace the foreign keys and utility tables for many-to-many relations with arrays of handles / pointers etc. But how much do I want to load into memory? Loading an actor shouldn't always load all items in their inventory and everything those items have relations to, not until actually needed.

  • Rieundefined Rie

    I'm wondering how to handle relations between classes / tables. E.g. Actors have an inventory of Items. I know how to represent this on the DB, but on the C++ side I need to replace the foreign keys and utility tables for many-to-many relations with arrays of handles / pointers etc. But how much do I want to load into memory? Loading an actor shouldn't always load all items in their inventory and everything those items have relations to, not until actually needed.

    Rieundefined

    So I guess I'll use getter methods which query the DB on the first time, and later just directly return the already loaded data. The database will not change during runtime of the game so it seems reasonable.

    But it WILL change when using the editor... hmm...

    Wondering if it'd be reasonable to skip the C++ class instances entirely and query the DB every time any data gets accessed using helper functions 🤔

  • Rieundefined Rie

    So I guess I'll use getter methods which query the DB on the first time, and later just directly return the already loaded data. The database will not change during runtime of the game so it seems reasonable.

    But it WILL change when using the editor... hmm...

    Wondering if it'd be reasonable to skip the C++ class instances entirely and query the DB every time any data gets accessed using helper functions 🤔

    Rieundefined

    Whatever approach I end up using I think it's gonna involve a lot of magic code generation to make it palatable. Adding new resource types must be a breeze and not involve 15 different boilerplate steps

  • Rieundefined Rie

    Whatever approach I end up using I think it's gonna involve a lot of magic code generation to make it palatable. Adding new resource types must be a breeze and not involve 15 different boilerplate steps

    Rieundefined

    Ok scratch that last idea about always querying the DB, it'd be way too slow.

    Now thinking about the almost opposite idea: When the app starts, load _everything_ into memory. Not assets of course, but all the plain data like stats and positions of nodes and such which is nothing in comparison to a few 4k textures. I think that's how Skyrim works actually.

  • Rieundefined Rie

    Ok scratch that last idea about always querying the DB, it'd be way too slow.

    Now thinking about the almost opposite idea: When the app starts, load _everything_ into memory. Not assets of course, but all the plain data like stats and positions of nodes and such which is nothing in comparison to a few 4k textures. I think that's how Skyrim works actually.

    Rieundefined

    Ok this might actually be going somewhere :) Just had to overcome the mental hurdle of thinking the database schema needs to be generateable from source code / at compile time. Instead of annotations (which aren't as powerful as I hoped) I just explicitely register classes and properties during initialization, similar to how Godot does it, and from that I can generate the schema at startup. I guess I would have needed to do something like that anyway for editor and scripting language interop.

  • Rieundefined Rie

    Ok this might actually be going somewhere :) Just had to overcome the mental hurdle of thinking the database schema needs to be generateable from source code / at compile time. Instead of annotations (which aren't as powerful as I hoped) I just explicitely register classes and properties during initialization, similar to how Godot does it, and from that I can generate the schema at startup. I guess I would have needed to do something like that anyway for editor and scripting language interop.

    Rieundefined

    I want to emphasize that is a wonderful gift to humanity. Not only is it a highly competent leightweight 2D and 3D engine, with it being open source you can inspect, learn from, and get inspired by its code. It's easier than ever to roll your own hobby engine since when in doubt you can just check how this production ready engine does things.

    Godot's architecture seems quite sound and well organized from what I can tell so it sets a good example.

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