The Best Game Engines

SlappingOysters writes "IGN has taken a look at the most impressive middleware solutions for the next generation of gaming, giving a detailed analysis of which engines are performing the best and which have the most exciting futures. It runs through the technical strengths of each engine, as well as how that translates into actual gameplay. It also runs through which software has and will be using each engine."

Comments

Re:And Valve is no where?

[Canazza]

Source isn't really that good. Or rather, it's Graphics aren't that good... and that won't make for a lovely 'next gen' video

I love Source, it's piss-easy to create content for, and there are shitload of 3rd party applications to speed up creation (Packrat, VTFEdit, and Milkshape from goldSRC - although Milkshape tended to SLOW creation at times :D)

You get Source-only modeling tools in the shape of XSI Softimage, for free, which is awesome.

Things like this is why Source is the biggest Modding platform ever, but that's also hurting it slightly in the main stream. All these amatuers creating sub-standard mods are giving Source a bad image (I can think of no mods that live up to Valves standards) and one of the few Commercial Source games released - Vampire Bloodlines - was riddled with bugs, and made a right mess of the lauded Source Facial Animation system leaving us well within the uncanny valley.

Sin: Episodes was slightly better, and completly ignored (just as Sin 1 was overshadowed by the original Half-life) and all their dev team left for other jobs leaving the whole thing in limbo.

Three of the most popular online games have been made in Source (Counter Strike Source, TF2 and L4D) and one of the most innovative and fun games in recent times (Portal) - most have been made by teams that started independant but became part of Valve.

The curse of Source - Merge with Valve or Fail miserably.

Re:BGE

[planetoid]

Blender's game engine seems like a good prototyping tool for artists to test out their animations and interactions before the project's actual game engine is even started, but I'm still convinced that it's too generalized to run at optimal performance for any specific type of game to be THE game engine for an actual game. Then again, computers these days are extremely fast compared to ten years ago, so you could argue that a certain degree of non-optimization is okay. I think we're all guilty of that, and we don't have to pay quite as much attention to detail in our code as we did back when we were programming for 486 25mhz systems in mind (though something about that seems morally wrong). Still, the question of performance pokes at me.

For example, is it guaranteed to draw only the bare minimum of polygons when you're in an indoors environment? Does it "know" when you're outdoors and use the optimal drawing orders for large outdoors areas?

And what about collision detection? That's another hairy subject that has the potential to snail down performance of even simple games (ever play a shmup with hundreds of bullets on the screen, but tends to slow down during those tense moments even on a fast machine? That's the programmer's fault). How does Blender know to internally use "this set of data structures and algorithms for collision detection with Situation And Circumstances X" but "these other data structures and algorithms for collision detection would be better with Situation and Circumstances Y instead"?

Of course, I know Blender is open source, and any of these issues can be resolved by forking your own Blender project for your own needs, but I'm asking strictly about Blender's game engine as it is "out of the box".

Nothing even related to idTech?

[Snowspinner]

I'm surprised that the only engine on this list to derive from the Quake family is the Call of Duty engine. I'm not enough of a game engine expert to disagree with any given choice, but it's very, very surprising to me to see one of the major families of engines basically ignored. At the very least, some discussion of its omission seems in order.