VIDEO GAME ENGINESBy Steven Taylor

What Is A Video Game Engine? Basically a video 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 desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. 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, and a scene graph. The process of game development is frequently economized by in large part reusing the same game engine to create different games.

What Does a Video Game Engine allow someone to do?

A video game engine provides development tools and reusable software components.

A video game engine also provides platform abstraction, allowing the same game to be run on various platforms including game consoles and personal computers with few, if any, changes made to the game source code. Often, game middleware is designed with a component-based architecture that allows specific systems in the engine to be replaced or extended with more specialized (and often more expensive) middleware components such as Havok for physics, FMOD for sound, or Scaleform for UI and Video.

The Modern Game Engine Modern game engines are some of the most

complex applications written, frequently featuring dozens of finely tuned systems interacting to ensure a precisely controlled user experience. The continued evolution of game engines has created a strong separation between rendering, scripting, artwork, and level design. It is now common, for example, for a typical game development team to have several times as many artists as actual programmers.

Lets Compare Two Video Games

HERE IS A OLDER VERSION OF MARIO

HERE IS ANOTHER VERSION OF MARIO BUT MORE RECENT

Here are two more games that have changed over time

HERE IS THE OLDER VERSION OF TETRIS

HERE IS A NEWER OR MORE RECENT VERSION

Here is a better demonstration

There are three main game engines are:

Role-your-own game engines Mostly-ready-version Point-and Click engines

The Role Your Own EngineFacts

Many mainstream and indie game makers use these types of engines

The interface applications are publically available and include: XNA, Direct X, and Open GL.

It gives the programmers the greatest amount of flexibility, letting them choose the components they want and integrating them how they want.

Programmers have to build the tool chain from scratch since the libraries are unreliable

The Mostly-ready Engine Facts

Are ready right out of the box, with rendering, input, GUI, physics and so on.

Some may have mature tool chains so you don’t have to roll your own.

Are a bit more limiting than roll-your-own engines and are frequently optimized.

Provide overall a better performance and requires less effort than most roll-your-own engines.

The Point-and-Click EngineFacts

Includes a full tool chain that allows you to point and click your way to creating a game.

Built to be as user friendly as possible. The only problem with this type is that it

can be extremely limiting. These engines allow you to work quickly

without much work.

So overall we can see how video games and their engines have changed throughout history

The development of new video game engines is caused by

The demand for games that consumers want and what the consumers want to be in the game.

PC gaming caused computer capabilities to move forward in a short amount of time