Week Seventeen

Game engines are the coding platforms that game are built onto. They run the code in the background that tells the game how to behave, what graphics to generate and how things should move. Having a well built game engine is key to having a smooth running and glitch free game. The typical engine provides a rendering engine, a physics engine, audio, animation, scripting, networking and a few others.

Reusing a pre existing game engine economises time and therefore money which can be a large advantage in the video game industry, especially with such long project times already. However, the more times that you re use an engine, the more outdated it becomes, and buying into one that wasn't created specifically for a project may mean that it won't quite do all of the things you'd like it to. But it will already have been tested, and team members may already be used to working with that specific engine and therefore be able to work more efficiently and know how to best work around its limitations.

Every generation of game engine is expected to be better than the last, and the key issues are normally quality of graphics, speed, better physics engines and cleared sound. Basically, all of the outputs have to improve with each generation. Also, keeping up with the changes in technology. Increasingly the big companies are trying to be more creative in the ways that we play games – with touch screen technology, wireless, lots of different in put devices and so on. The game engine needs to be able to deal with all of these new options, as well as the improvements to graphics etc.

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/technology.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine
http://www.devcellsoftware.com/
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sweeney-unreal-game,news-739.html