Game Engines (Magazine Article)

A game engine is the software system that is designed for the creation and development of games; they provide software frameworks for developers to create video games. The functions that are mainly provided by games engines are rendering engines, physics engines, sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support and a scene graph.

2D Game Engines and Mobile Game Engines

GameSalad is a 2D game engine, which helps to create games for the computer and mobile devices. It is an authoring tool that composes games in a “drag and drop” fashion. It’s used by graphic designers, animators and games developers for rapid creation of a game. A mobile game engine creates both 2D and 3D games for the mobile devices such as iPhones and Androids.

3D Game Engines

Frostbite

A 3D game engine can generate moving objects from a mathematical representation of the world in real time. Frostbite is a 3D game engine; it is developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and is the creator of the Battlefield series. Frostbite is currently designed to be played on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii U; it creates both first person shooters and racing games. It has created games such as Battlefield: Bad Company, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield: 1943, Battlefield 3, Need For Speed: The Run and Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

Game Mods

“Mod or modification is a term generally applied to personal computer game”

Taken from Wikipedia

 They are made by developers and even the public, some can even create new games within a game. They require the user to have the original game in order to be made and run properly. Mods can include new weapons, characters, game modes and even more things. A partial conversion is when the mod adds new content to the original game, a total conversion is when the mod creates an entirely new game and unofficial patches are when the mod fixes certain bugs within the game. The most famous of mods is known as “Garry’s Mod” or “GMod”, it is a sandbox (a player has the ability to use tools to change various thing and change the way they play a game) physics game, which uses the Source Engine. Originally Garry’s mod was just a modification in the game Half-life 2 but it was then released as a separate game in 2006, but it requires the user to own at least one of the following games on Steam: Half-life 2, Portal, Counter Strike: Source or Team Fortress 2.

Wikipedia

Garry’s Mod

The Purpose of a Game Engine

Game engines provide a wide range of visual development tools along with reusable software components. The facilities that they provide often ease development, such as physics and sound. Rendering is used when the “pre image” (wireframe image) is complete; it adds in bitmap textures, lights, bump mapping and relative positions to other objects. Collision detection is the process of detecting when two things within games are about to collide. On PC games when your mouse is placed over an object or the players hand, that is also known as collision detection and allows the player to move around or interact with the object. Artificial intelligence is the technique used within a video game that produces an illusion that the computer controlled characters are able to know where to go, what to do along with other things. A physics engine is computer software which provides the simulation of different physics systems, such as rigid, soft and fluid body dynamics (collision detection). In video games the simulations are done in real-time, there are two different classes of a physics engine: real time (used mainly in video games and use very simple calculations and decreased accuracy, this is so it will compute in time for the game to respond) and high precision (scientists and computer animators use this, they require more processing power in order to calculate very precise physics). Havok Physics is one of the most well known physics engines around and has helped make games such as Assassins Creed 1 and 2 and Carnival Games. Here is a demo of the havok physics engine.

The History of Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine Comparison

The unreal engine has been developed by Epic Games since it was made in 1998, it has helped to create all of the Unreal Tournament games (Unreal, Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Unreal Tournament 3) and other games such as Batman: Arkham Asylum and ArkhamCity and the Gears of War games. There have been 4 iterations (process of repeating something a certain amount of time until a desired goal is achieved) of the Unreal Engine (Unreal Engine 1, 2, 3 and 4). Unreal Engine 1 integrated rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networking and a file system, it relied on very simple collision detection. Unreal Engine 2 vastly improved the rendering engine and included Karma physics, this allowed ragdoll effects; it also supported modern generation consoles at that time (PS2, XBOX, GameCube). Unreal Engine 3 supports DirectX; this allows the games to be played on XBOX360’s and PS3’s. Unreal Engine 4 has recently been brought out and its major feature is a real time global illumination which uses voxel cone tracing, this means it eliminates the need for pre-computed lighting.