Space Pyramids: Task 18: Elements of Game Technology, part one: game engines

‘Research the different kinds of engine, their advantages and disadvantages, market penetration, usability, technology features and what games they support.’

There are many different game engines for different purposes, platforms, genre, gameplay style and you cannot asses pros and cons of any until you are decided on those things.

Once you are, however you can begin to narrow down the choices. The main deciding factor will ultimately be does the engine give you tools that you will need/ use, in the case of the Frostbite 2 engine, well yes it does, but for more a shooter biased stand point. The engine focuses more on achieving fluid animations and physics along side map destructibility and map scale.

Where as engines like Unreal engine 3 and CryENGINE 3 are geared more towards advanced tessellation, minute details and displacement mapping.

(These are very limited overviews, each engine has it’s own focus, tools and unique capabilities.)

A small list of more popular engines:

FrostBite

Unreal

Unity

CryENGINE

Source

Blender

RPG Maker

BigWorld

Now usability, I would say that bottles down to the big three engines that have been made available for free download: Unreal Engine; Cry Engine; Unity engine. Now I cannot speak from personal experience about all three however I can about UDK. The Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles, providing a vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game developers. From personal experience it is more or less like learning 3Ds max, time consuming, daunting at first, however quick to pick up and remarkably powerful tools when you know how to use them.

Unity is a multiplatform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation. A fully integrated professional application, Unity just happens to contain the most powerful engine this side of a million dollars.

Unity supports a variety of platforms using a single editor. It supports advanced visual effects with shader material support.

Cry engine is Next-Gen ready with scalable computation and graphics technologies. CryENGINE 3 is the only game engine that provides multi-award winning graphics, state-of-the art lighting, physics and AI, out of the box.

Rather than me lengthily write the features I thought these videos would better explain:

Features of Unreal engine4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acR4n6lJEdQ

Features of CryENGINE3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWvgETOo5ek

Features of Unity4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpi4J11ZE1o

Finally I will list the most recognisable games made from these engines:

Unreal:

Batman Arkham City

BioShock Infinite

Dishonored