Chapter 3. Forge of the Gods – Shaping Our World
In the previous chapter, we have covered loading, managing, and releasing of external resources. To sum up, we have investigated mechanisms to ensure that textures, fonts, or sounds are ready to be used as soon as we need them. This chapter attempts to bring knowledge around a few key topics:
Entity systems in concept and practice
The viewable area of our world and scrolling
Tree-based scene graphs, rendering and updating of many entities
Composition of all elements to shape the world
When writing a game, we invariably find the need to conceptualize our vision of the game into actual data structures. In other words, it is extremely important to have a clear idea of the scope of our vision. The world in our mind doesn't even have to scale remotely to what we consider our real world; it is a product of our own creation. It is well within our power, as game developers, to forge the whole world as a simple board game table, or an ant farm, or even...