SAGE: A Simple Academic Game Engine

Version 1.0, June 2006

Students learning game programming in academia need an engine that is flexible, extensible, stable, and well-documented. Industry game engines are production code, code that is designed merely to work. An academic game engine should be written to be easy to understand and modify, especially to relatively inexperienced students. It should obey the educational principle “Proceed from the known into the unknown”.

SAGE consists of a game engine developed as a sequence of demos, each built on its predecessor, a process called incremental development. Incremental Development has been used by Ian Parberry in his game programming classes since 1993, and his 2000 and 2001 books on 2D game programming. SAGE brings this experience to a fully 3D game engine, based on an educational pedagogy that has a proven track record of placing students in the game industry.

SAGE Version 1 demos include:

Demo 0: Model viewer
Demo 1: Terrain
Demo 2: Shaders
Demo 3: Game engine architecture
Demo 4: Collision detection
Demo 5: Particle engine
Demo 6: Sound

SAGE is open source code released under the BSD license. It is written in C++ using Visual Studio 2005 and DirectX 9.0. The SAGE website http://larc.csci.unt.edu/sage includes full source code, tutorials, and additional information. SAGE was created by faculty and students in the Laboratory for Recreational Computing, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of North Texas.

Credits: Ian Parberry (Principal Investigator), Jeremy Nunn, Joe Scheinberg, Erik Carson, Jason Cole.

If you make use of SAGE in your class or research project, and/or derive new works from it, we would love to hear from you. Please contact Ian Parberry, contact information at http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian.

SAGE was funded by a grant from Microsoft Research.

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