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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."
they had done the same with F/OSS and/or Cross platform game engines, the article would have been significantly more interesting...
Most of the big commercial engines are pretty useless to those without a budget, or with a desire to target their favorite OS...
The Source engine is a great engine and the results frankly impress me a lot more than Unreal engine. Bioshock was an incredible game, but the look and feel of HL2 and it's subsequent episodes/tech demos were far more impressive visually.
Not only that, but the Source engine is painfully easy to mod and is supported by a company that goes out of its way to encourage third party developers to use it.
Frankly I'm disappointed that Source was not mentioned here.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Imo, PvP is considered Content, and has nothing to do with the engine.
A Game engine focuses on things like the underlying game mechanics (movement, physics etc), graphics rendering (Including, but not limited to Shader language, Character animation system, the basic UI handlers and texture engine) network handling and whatever scripting language is used to create content.
Things that come under "Content" are all the things that are put on top of an engine to make a game. IE Combat, interacting with NPCs, Menu systems, Inventory systems, weapons. Most of which is done through whatever scripting language the engine uses (In the case of Unreal it's the UnrealED application and it's scripting language. In the case of Source, it's a mixture of many things, mainly Map-based Entities created through Hammer and C#/C++ if you're changing game mechanics)
Having never played Asherons Call, I can't comment on the gameplay, but a good movement system on it's own does not make a good PvP system.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
C#
Being able to mod source in C# would be the best drug ever.
Or it might not.
I get your point that using a 3rd party engine would seem to limit your creativity: you wouldn't want to use an engine designed for a FPS to write Battleship Frisbee Cookoff Challenge.
However, if you're intending to create a game that's even remotely within a common genre, then using a 3rd party engine frees you up to concentrate on producing a unique experience. You can blow 20 man years just to catch up with the last generation of Quake, or you can start with a working, tested engine and concentrate your resources on adding just the new functionality and tools that you need.
Why, yes, I'm speaking from experience (of doing it the wrong way). Thanks for asking!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's not every day I come across a perfectly good excuse to toot my own horn. Here is my list of free game engines: http://www.freegameengines.org/ My definition of "game engine" is a bit stricter than most. I believe Wikipedia has a similar list.
Drivel like this article is why I quit Slashdot. You can quit too! with only occasional relapses.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
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".
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
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.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havok_(software)
I think this list covers it: http://www.havok.com/content/blogcategory/29/73/