Implementing an Interactive Game Console

This month, Michael König is going to talk about how to implement an interactive game console.

Despite the word combination "game console" typically identifying a piece of hardware, it appears no one has bothered finding a more distinct name for this common feature of modern (PC) game engines.

Popularized by FPS engines such as Source (Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal) and id Tech (Quake, Doom), "consoles" are command-line interfaces to an engine's inner workings.

Once activated by a special key press, the user may invoke commands and inspect and edit variables.

For example, by typing "gfx_farclip 2500" the rendering distance may be adjusted and by typing "map de_aztec" the engine may be instructed to load the map "de_aztec".

The commands and variables exposed by the console typically map to some function and variable in the engine's source code.

In this talk I will outline the implementation of such a system in my pet game engine incorporating C++11 features for elegance. In particular, some variadic template fun allows for automatic and type-safe parameter parsing.

Attention: We will start at 18.30 (30 minutes earlier than usual)