I've just started to program a game engine and to my surprise the most difficult to structure aspect of the programming has been essentially, I'm not really sure how to word this, but mapping things to other things.
Making sure that a keypress eventually leads to the right function being called is a good example. It seemed really simple at first but then I figured that the keypress shouldn't directly call the function because then you'd need to recode or reparameterize some giant state machine because in certain contexts a keypress can do many things or control many different objects in the game (even controlling multiple objects at the same time, and what if you want to be able to control the game remotely or from two controllers at once?).
Before I started I thought the 3d movement and physics stuff would be the hardest... but I've found it was actually pretty simple, I just iterate through a list of objects and just call their respective member functions to make the movement happen and it seems to work fine for now.
Making sure that a keypress eventually leads to the right function being called is a good example. It seemed really simple at first but then I figured that the keypress shouldn't directly call the function because then you'd need to recode or reparameterize some giant state machine because in certain contexts a keypress can do many things or control many different objects in the game (even controlling multiple objects at the same time, and what if you want to be able to control the game remotely or from two controllers at once?).
Before I started I thought the 3d movement and physics stuff would be the hardest... but I've found it was actually pretty simple, I just iterate through a list of objects and just call their respective member functions to make the movement happen and it seems to work fine for now.