Elements of game technology Game engines

Elements of Game Technology

Game Engines

For this blog I will be looking at and researching the different kinds of Game engines, their advantages and disadvantages, market penetration, usability, technology features and what games they support.

Game engine definition

A game engine is a software system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, and a scene graph. The process of game development is frequently economized by in large part reusing/adapting the same game engine to create different games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine

Game engine advantages

One major advantage when using a game engine is the fact that the level design can be re-used when creating other games, which makes them cost effective and time effective. Also despite the specificity of the name, game engines are often used for other kinds of interactive applications with real-time graphical requirements such as marketing demos, architectural visualizations, training simulations, and modelling environments, which is also an advantage.

Advantages:

• Most if not all of the coding is done for you, so all you have to worry about is content, level layout, etc.


• Along those lines, memory management, asset loading, lighting (in complex engines), etc has all been designed and tested thoroughly (hopefully).


• As mentioned below, if the engine is cross platform you will have to do little to no work to port your game.

Disadvantages:

• If you are modifying anything, you now need to become familiar with a new codebase.


• If there is a bug in the engine, unless it is open source you can't fix it.


• The engine was not designed specifically for your game, so it may be less efficient than code you write specifically for your game.


• Game engines generally are not free.


• If a game is small, the overhead of using an engine may not be worth the time invested to write code yourself.


• If your game engine also has any editors or tools, you will have to build and test those as well before turning them over to artists or relying on them yourself.

http://efreedom.com/Question/4-859/Advantages-Disadvantages-Using-Game-Engine

Game engines are a really good tool to show you how good your meshes and textures are and if you need to make any alterations to them. We have recently been using the unreal engine in a group project at university and it has proved to be quite challenging. Trying to adjust to the different transform tool buttons has been especially hard, when I’m so used to a different set within 3dds max. I am still learning to use the unreal editor but I’m sure I will get to grips with it soon.