3D Game Engine Programming advice

I am a 3D artist interested in 3D game programming, not as a future
profession, but to understand how they work. While I've found many
tutorials on 3D programming, I've found very few discussing the underlying
structure of an actual game engine, except in the most vague form (the sites
I've found discuss the parts of the engine, ie- ai, renderer, etc... but
none on how to design these compnents to work together.) Others explain how
to use specific game engines to create games, but my goal is to understand
the inner workings of the engine itself, using only C++ and a graphics SDK
(DirectX or OpenGL). Any suggestions? Any good sites to begin with?

Well, how much programming do you know?

Games basically have three parts: rendering, polling and logic. The
player presses some keys that get polled and update the logic which is
used to render the graphics.

You could read "Game Developer Magazine" which has some excellent
behind-the-scenes articles on game development. It's not all about
hyping the newest game.

A great source is "Beginning OpenGl Game Programming" by Astle and
Hawkins (ISBN 1-59200-369-9). They introduce OpenGL programming and by
the end of the book they have a few little games developed. It is an
excellent book. I've completed a couple of little games since reading
the book and working on number three.

Richard
richard@aggragant.ca