Good modeling practice?

The following pictures show a boolean operation I did with booltool 0.2. The model looks very clean, but since there are so many discussions about good modeling practices, I wanted to ask if this is a correct and consistent way to model an object.

The 2 faces surrounding the opening are obviously ngons.

If I model for a game engine, I understand quads are very important. Can someone also please show me the best way I would create this same object, but keeping it useful for a game engine?

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if you add a subsurface modifier to your object you will see the problem with it. the correct way to do this would be to add a circle in front of your mesh where the hole will be, use surface snapping to paste the circle onto the cylinder, then…
make loop cuts just below and above where the hole will be, delete the faces that overlap with the hole, then…
join the circle with the cylinder and fill in the gaps.
then, select the edge of your hole, and extrude it backwards. you can even up the back region using the knife tool, or the scaling widget, before or after closing the remaining hole-back.
note: you will want to pay attention to how many vertexes your circle has when you add it
additional note: don’t seal the final hole with an n-gon. and you might want to make additional loop cuts to tighten up some of the edges. avoid n-gons when possible.
(edit) the other problem with n-gons, is they can really screw up your UV mapping.

Actually. quads vs triangles dont matter for a game engine at all. all video cards process 3d surface data by the triangle, and all game engines are set up to work with triangles. or quads.

the reason quad modeling is the “best practice”, is because most tools used in mesh editing, like loop cutting and selecting, etc. depend on quad topology, and its easier to predict how a mesh will deform when animated with a quad mesh. in general its best to keep a “soft” model that will be rigged and animated all quad. but hard surface stuff that will never need to deform, you can really do what ever gets your shading correct and minimizes vertex count. this is generally quads. but there are certain situations where its advantageous to go ahead and change something to a triangle to control shading issues caused by “incorrect” automatic triangulation.

Thanks for the responses, they really helped.