Assignment 7 - Game Engines

Assignment 7 Game Engines

In this assignment, I will be looking at four game engines either currently in use in today's game industry, or engines that will be released in the future for next generation games development.

Unity Engine 4 is an engine released during the Summer of 2012, and comes in two forms... the basic free version and a paid for Unity Pro version. The engine was originally developed for Apple platforms, although it has since evolved to encompass any platform from games consoles to mobile phones. The developers state that their intention for Unity is to provide a low cost engine to enable more developers to afford to create new games quickly and cheaply, and to that end it includes several features including an asset shop to download ready made assets and supporting software which can cut time considerably. Unity also includes inbuilt animation capabilities to allow animation and motion capture within the engine, certain assets created outside the engine to be automatically updated without requiring files to be uploaded with edits, and for textures and assets to be used across games designed for multiple platforms. Overall, my impression of the engine is that it lacks the punch of other engines, but the above aspects on top of making use of C+ programming languages serves to help a games development team produce games for consoles and phones in a fairly efficient manner, and therefore seems like an engine that would benefit those that are new to the games industry.

The Source engine was developed by Valve and showcased in 2004 in the games Counter Strike : Source and Half Life 2. Since then, the engine has gone through several upgrades as technology has advanced, the same engine being used in more recent games like Portal 2 and Defence of the Ancients 2 with new features designed to ensure the engine's long life, like improved particles and lighting. Additionally, the Source engine is accessible to anyone whom has purchased at least one game, which has made the engine very popular amongst the modding community, although the vast majority of games that are made using Source tend to be First Person Shooters – Exceptions include the RPG Vindictus and the top down shooter Alien Swarm. However, aside from the latter games mentioned, relatively few games have been developed commercially with the Source engine outside of Valve itself, with the unwieldy SDK tool set and a need to deeply understand coding commands being amongst the chief reasons for being underused – with Valve employees all being required to understand how Source engine functions.

Unreal Engine 3 was developed by Epic Games in 2004, and as with previous versions of the engine it has proven highly popular in the games industry, with flexibility to create many different genres of game and a largely intuitive tool kit. Many games I have enjoyed over the years have utilised the engine, including the Gears of War series (made by Epic) and the Mass Effect series, and both of these games are distinctive from one another... with one being a cover based shooter and the other being an RPG. Like Source, UE3 has proven very popular within modding communities, and in 2009 Epic further opened up their engine to allow the development of mods into stand alone games in exchange for royalties and a small fee.

And the last engine I looked at is one that is not yet available, and that is the Luminous Engine by Square Enix, with the real time tech demo “Agni's Philosophy” recently being showcased to demonstrate it's capabilities. First and foremost, Luminous is an engine very much aimed towards taking full advantage of the next generation of gaming consoles, but it also offers the flexibility of being used for a variety of current platforms and mobile devices... a feature similar to that of Unity 4 and therefore potentially of greater benefit to games development teams being able to use one engine to create games for different platforms instead of learning to use multiple engines and of course widen the audience developers can aim at.

One aim for Luminous has been to create an engine capable of creating graphics on par with those used in pre rendered animation, and this also includes aspects like creating particles and lighting on the fly rather than having to render these sorts of changes, which can consume time as builds are tested and iterated on.