Engine Design / Development

[Zach]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had links on some good reading, or had good advice themselves, on the process of engine design. Specifically the proper way to develop a modular engine.
What I mean by that is something that has a small core, and then communicates with other sub-systems that can be swapped out with little or no core modification, and that type of thing.

I haven't had much success on finding this kind of information myself.. I usually get hits on books or pages that discuss the team aspects, management, coding style etc.. I can't seem to find anything that discusses the actual coding and development aspects, with stuff like code examples of building an engine (modular or otherwise) and tying things together to make it all work..

I'd really like to write an engine where stuff like the display/rendering, input, AI, scripting support, etc are independent systems that can be interchanged at will (if that makes sense). Basically allowing to change aspects of what the engine can do without having to do full recompiles, etc..

I'm also wanting to learn about implementing scripting (I'd like to integrate something like Python or LUA) so that the game/engine can be reusable or easily modifiable by users if I chose to allow that.
For this particular project I'm not concerned about total modularity, as the engine is going to be specifically designed for Text RPG/Adventure games, but I definitely don't know where to start in terms of getting a scripting language integrated easily.. I read something that mentioned having some kind of "Layer" between the engine and the scripting language or something like that, so the two could communicate.

Although I'd really like to be able to use some kind of compiled scripting language where the engine can read it no problem, but the average gamer looking to cheat would just see a bunch of non-human-readable stuff.. The general idea is I would write a development tool, where the actual game assets can be built, etc.. Then exports it all into compiled scripts and any other misc files I might use for stuff (there will be an SQLite DB most likely).

If anyone has any good links on the guts of how to design engines, etc I think that is really what I would need right now.

[IdeasVacuum]

Some good info: http://www.flipcode.com/archives/articles.shtml

[Zach]

Thanks.. That's definitely a huge list.

Is there anything specific you might point out for me to start with?