These seem to be like the backbone of a game, but is it just the software to run it?
I assume you build your assets in other software and you import them into your engine, unless the engine does most of the heavy lifting these days?
If licensing good engines like unreal are relatively cheap these days, why is it so impressive to build your own? Some companies like Rockstar have used the RAGE engine reliably, whereas other games like halo infinite and cyberpunk crashed and burned. How could this happen when the developers should be intimately familiar with tech they built themselves?
I have been playing games my whole life but I have no idea how they work.
In: Engineering
Game Engines are the code that runs the game. They have many different components to manage the different parts of the game.
They will load the models and textures for the game, animations, manage user input, the game camera, objects in the game, logic and AI for the game objects, manage terrain, pathfinding, collisions, physics and the logic of the game.
It makes sense to use a pre-built game engine because a lot of those things listed above are common for most games. A lot of implementation of the various parts of the game engine are really technical, hard to do well and for the most part game developers are more interested in using them rather than making them.
There are different reasons not use someone else’s game engine.
Licensing is usually based on a % of revenue, unreal lists 5% for games that make more than a million dollars.
The GTA games are one of the biggest franchises out there and GTA 5 has made around $8.5 billion. A 5% cut is $425 million dollars. Game engines are hard but there is a strong argument to make a game engine that you can reuse and potentially sell if its going to cost hundreds of millions to use some else’s.
Bethesda uses their own engine for the Fallout and Eldar Scroll games and CD Project for the Witcher and Cyberpunk games. These are big studios working on some of the biggest video game franchises and it makes sense for them to own their own engine.
Building your own engine also allows you to customise it to your game. 3rd party game engines are made general to be used for as many different games as possible. Sometimes it makes sense to make the game engine to meet your needs. I would guess that most flight simulators fall in this category.
Using a 3rd party engine also makes you dependent on a 3rd party. There was an uproar a year ago where Unity changed their licensing structure and threw a lot of game developers into disarray to the point where their games would be taken down because they could not continue under the new licence.
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