SyDRA: An Approach to Understand Game Engine Architecture

Game engines are tools to facilitate video game development. They provide graphics, sound, and physics simulation features, which would have to be otherwise implemented by developers. Even though essential for modern commercial video game development, game engines are complex and developers often struggle to understand their architecture, leading to maintainability and evolution issues that negatively affect video game productions. In this paper, we present the Subsystem-Dependency Recovery Approach (SyDRA), which helps game engine developers understand game engine architecture and therefore make informed game engine development choices. By applying this approach to 10 open-source game engines, we obtain architectural models that can be used to compare game engine architectures and identify and solve issues of excessive coupling and folder nesting. Through a controlled experiment, we show that the inspection of the architectural models derived from SyDRA enables developers to complete tasks related to architectural understanding and impact analysis in less time and with higher correctness than without these models.游戏引擎是用于辅助电子游戏开发的工具套件。它们提供图形渲染、音效处理与物理模拟等核心功能，若不借助游戏引擎，这些功能均需开发者自行实现。尽管现代商业化电子游戏开发离不开游戏引擎，但这类工具本身架构复杂，开发者往往难以透彻理解其内部结构，由此引发可维护性与演化性层面的问题，进而对游戏制作流程产生负面影响。本文提出了子系统依赖恢复方法（Subsystem-Dependency Recovery Approach，SyDRA），可帮助游戏引擎开发者理解引擎架构，从而做出审慎合理的开发决策。我们将该方法应用于10款开源游戏引擎，得到了对应的架构模型，此类模型可用于对比不同游戏引擎的架构，并识别与解决过度耦合、文件夹嵌套过深等架构问题。通过对照实验，我们验证得出：借助由SyDRA生成的架构模型进行检视分析，开发者能够在更短时间内完成与架构理解及影响分析相关的任务，且任务正确率显著高于未使用此类模型的情况。