Resources and the File System

G ames are by nature multimedia experiences. A game engine therefore needs to be capable of loading and managing a wide variety of different kinds of media—texture bitmaps, 3D mesh data, animations, audio clips, collision and physics data, game world layouts, and the list goes on. Moreover, because memory is usually scarce, a game engine needs to ensure that only one copy of each media file is loaded into memory at any given time. For example, if five meshes share the same texture, then we would like to have only one copy of that texture in memory, not five. Most game engines employ some kind of resource manager (a.k.a. asset manager , a.k.a. media manager ) to load and manage the myriad resources that make up a modern 3D game.