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Welcome to mde

Mde is an attempt at making a game engine. However, instead of starting with the graphics like many game engines, mde has started with some of the mechanisms needed within the engine (see Features).

A few notes about mde

Well, the existing code doesn't do nearly enough yet to constitute a game. So be warned, you're looking at a very young and incomplete project.

I think the question I've been asked most about this (and my previous) game project, is what genre is it for? Right now that question isn't very relevant, and as far as is reasonable I don't intend to specialise the project. But it's definitely intended for first-person real-time 3D games.

Also, I am not intending to build a game, but just a game engine. I have plenty of ideas for games, but I am not an artist, nor do I have a team behind me. Thus I, myself, am not likely to implement any more than game demos, if even that.

Background

The purpose of this section is as a very brief auto-biography concerning my programming.

Until I did my A-levels, I was mostly home-taught; through this I have learnt to teach and motivate myself. At university, I studied maths and a little computer science − originally as part of my course, but also as options. However, most of my programming skills I've taught myself (starting with winlogo and quickbasic, later moving on to C++ and then D, and also a tiny amount of dabling in scripting languages like python and lua), with the exception of a uni course on (mo)sml.

On the mathematical side of computing, I did a little study on the mathematics of floating-point operations, and also did some research into the use of quaternions to represent 3D rotations for a second year essay (link).

What I've really been interested in using computers for is game development (like many others, I guess). In the past I've attempted modding a few games (e.g. Total Annihilation), had a few attempts at simple games using qbasic (including a maze generator and asteroids-type game) and gone on to start developing a game engine in C++ (which was largely experimentation with OpenGL and physics simulations in space, with higher aims).

Although my previous project (GE-118) wasn't progressing too badly, I got annoyed with C++, particularly it's STL's templates (how does map<index_Input,pair<DUIAxis,bool> >::iterator constitute a simple type?). I discovered D and really liked it (for example, the fact that type definitions involving pointers and arrays are actually comprehensible − although, of course, there's much more besides this). Anyhow, after discovering D, I had two choices: port GE-118 to D or start over. I chose the latter option, partly because of dependencies, but mostly because I wanted to redesign from scratch rather than have to revise my existing code.