Engine Support Systems

E very game engine requires some low-level support systems that manage mundane but crucial tasks, such as starting up and shutting down the engine, configuring engine and game features, managing the engine's memory usage, handling access to file system(s), providing access to the wide range of heterogeneous asset types used by the game (meshes, textures, animations, audio, etc.), and providing debugging tools for use by the game development team. This chapter will focus on the lowest-level support systems found in most game engines. In the chapters that follow, we will explore some of the larger core systems, including resource management, human interface devices and in-game debugging tools.