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Visualising Game Engine Subsystem Coupling Patterns

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Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2023 (ICEC 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14455))

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Abstract

Game engines support video game development by providing functionalities such as graphics rendering or input/output device management. However, their architectures are often overlooked, which hinders their integration and extension. In this paper, we use an approach for architecture recovery to create architectural models for 10 open-source game engines. We use these models to answer the following questions: Which subsystems more often couple with one another? Do game engines share subsystem coupling patterns? We observe that the Low-Level Renderer, Platform Independence Layer and Resource Manager are frequently coupled to the game engine Core. By identifying the most frequent coupling patterns, we describe an emergent game engine architecture and discuss how it can be used by practitioners to improve system understanding and maintainability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Multi-User Dungeon, a text-based precursor of MMORPG games.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/gamedev-studies/game-engine-analyser.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/minetest/minetest.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/moosetechnology.

  5. 5.

    https://pharo.org/.

  6. 6.

    https://gephi.org/.

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Acknowledgement

The authors were partially supported by the NSERC Discovery Grant and Canada Research Chairs programs.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Gabriel C. Ullmann & Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

  2. École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Fabio Petrillo & Cristiano Politowski

  3. Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 - CRIStAL, Lille, France

    Nicolas Anquetil

Authors
  1. Gabriel C. Ullmann
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  2. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc
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  3. Fabio Petrillo
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  4. Nicolas Anquetil
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  5. Cristiano Politowski
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gabriel C. Ullmann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Paolo Ciancarini

  2. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Angelo Di Iorio

  3. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Helmut Hlavacs

  4. Italian National Research Council (CNR), Rome, Italy

    Francesco Poggi

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C. Ullmann, G., Guéhéneuc, YG., Petrillo, F., Anquetil, N., Politowski, C. (2023). Visualising Game Engine Subsystem Coupling Patterns. In: Ciancarini, P., Di Iorio, A., Hlavacs, H., Poggi, F. (eds) Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2023. ICEC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14455. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8248-6_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8248-6_22

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-99-8247-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-8248-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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