Ok, so I am not 100% sure this is the correct board to post this in, but…
I am building an game engine from scratch, and I was wondering: What do you think should be the bare minimum of graphics effects in a game engine that is written for a wide variety of 3d games? Edit: what effects would you want in a game engine if you were developing a 3d game with it?(e.g. Shadow mapping, particles, ?)
NECESSARILY? nothing besides being able to render objects. but if I had to say you hit it on the nose, beyond Sound and Rendering 3D models, Shadows and Particle Effects are the 2 Id say would add(though a little above Bare Minimum) but a wholeheartedly welcome addition.
Maybe I should rephrase that. I meant what effects people would want if they were developing a game with it, but I didn’t write that correctly 
We would want to see all features of JMonkeyEngine 3.0 and Ardor3D ;D
I hope you only do that for pedagogical purposes…
Haha, challenge accepted!
A wise man once said, “don’t write game engines, write games!”
He was very wise.
We should have a wiki page of things not to write. I also propose physics libraries and anything that “solves everyone’s problems” for any subsystem.
But the people who wanted to write game engines and not games thought he was a dolt.
The people(like me) that thought: Oh yes. Let’s write the next unreal, also thought he was a dolt. For the first 20 minutes. And then they realize why it is called “Unreal”.