Creating your own game (simulation) engine: Choosing your multimedia library

To create my own engine, I need to focus on what my model's needs are. A crowd model as I explained in an earlier post, can be seen as a multi-agent system. A multi-agent system (MAS), according to Wikipedia, is a 'computerised system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents within an environment'.These agents can be divided into different types, passive agents, active agents or very complex agents with a lot of complex calculations.

In my model, the passive agents themselves do not make decisions, but can be guided by an underlying flow field, whilst active agents are based on Agent Based Models (ABM), and have individual behavioural properties through the environment.

Simulation vs Game

At this point, I feel it's important to point out the similarity between a simulation and a game, and you will see why a game engine can be used for the purposes of both a game and a simulation. Both progress in time, and respond to user input through the keyboard or mouse, creating an interactive experience. A simulation is several states of a model that is updated over time. A model can be defined by various parameters and equations, with the model being at a particular state, at any given time. A simulation, on the other hand, is a model's state that continuously updates over time in discrete steps, through the use of a timer. This creates the simulation, and the illusion of the model changing over time.

I appreciate that this can be a bit of a mouthful, so let's take another view, such as a car racing game. A game can also be seen as several states of a car and it's interaction with the environment, that is updated over time. Again the state of the car is defined by physics equations and various parameters. Now, say you have a car accelerating in that car racing game. If you pause the game, that is the state of the game. Unpause the game, and that state of the game is updated every few milliseconds. Based on the acceleration, the car keeps moving forward, and you see the updated state on the screen in continuous time, creating the illusion of the car speeding in the game. This is similar to the model's state changing over time, you seeing the updated state of the model in continous time, and hence the simulation. One such simulation, is the continuum crowds simulation.

Media Library

Now, to get to grips with creating your own simulation engine, you need a good grasp of C++. If you've never done programming, it'll be a very steep learning curve and I wouldn't personally recommend it as an introduction to programming, but if you're up to the challenge, I would personally recommend two excellent books, 'Accelerated C++: Practical Programming by Example' followed by 'Efficient C++: 55 Specific ways to Improve your programs and designs'. They are excellent in terms of teaching you the foundations of C++ through uses in applications, and I believe that it is one of the best ways to learn. You start by writing robust programs straight away, and that will give you a sense of achievement which will keep you motivated to carry on and learn much of the lower level complex language features such as memory management, in context, which sits better, rather than learning the language features without knowing where it will be applied. Afterall, programming is more about problem solving, than the features of the language for it's own sake.

That was a slight tangent, so bringing us back to the issue of creating our own simulation engine, we first need a library that would provide us with a framework to work around. Something that would provide low level access to the keyboard, mouse, 3D hardware, and finally an application window within which our model can sit. To get an idea what this would look like, the image below shows a game 'Freeciv' sitting inside an application window.

Freeciv screenshot

Having an application window, allows us to provide keyboard and mouse interactivity, and visualise the model (something I will talk about in a future post). Now, if you're using Windows, Mac or Linux, it is always possible to use the native libraries such as the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) in Windows, or use other cross platform media libraries that allow the user to use any Operating System.

Using cross platform media libraries can be considered as a little cheating, so to speak, if you're talking about creating your own engine, but it makes some aspects of the development easier, and there's still a lot of programming to do. It's a "grey" area though. Besides, there have been popular game engines, such as Allegro, actually written using a cross platform media library (SDL), so case in point.

Looking at cross platform media libraries, there are various options, such as SDL, SFML, openFrameworks (which I've talked about in a previous post), and libCinder. The latter two are fairly new libraries, with the focus on creative coding, it's the C++ equivalent of Processing in Java.

SDL on the other hand was first developed in early 1998 by Sam Lantinga. There have been many commercial games written with it, such as Neverwinter Nights, Second Life, and Unreal Tournament 2004 (Linux version), which makes it a good choice, as it's proven it's worth in a stability and online support point of view.

SDL as described, has a thin, cross-platform wrapper that provides the 2D pixel operations, sound, file access, event handling, timing, threading, and more. It can be complemented with OpenGL, which I have done, but I'll talk about that in a future post, along with providing mouse and keyboard input. It also provides several separate official libraries with more functionality, such as
SDL_image (dealing with image files), SDL_ttf  (True Type Font library).

As it's a media library, it abstracts away from the low level interaction between operating system and hardware, here's a figure that shows the abstraction:

SDL Abstraction Layers

I chose SDL as a library due to the popularity and support available online (the current stable version being v1.2, although v2.0 is expected to be out soon). To put it in context, it will provide the main framework for my model, and everything will be built within it.

If you would like to know how to use it, a good set of tutorials are available here. Don't forget the official SDL website.
In a future post, I will detail the next steps.