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
An engine is software for building and running a game. It’s supposed to handle all the common tasks that any game might need to do: drawing graphics, playing sounds, calculating physics, organising events, running gameplay over the internet, and so on.
Writing a major game engine is impressive because it’s a big piece of software with many features. It needs to be carefully balanced and optimised to work for different kinds of games, on different kinds of computers.
When you use an engine to make a game, sometimes you want to make the game work a certain way, but it’s hard or even impossible because the engine just doesn’t offer that. If you write a game from scratch with your own engine, you’re free to do anything you want, and you’ll be more familiar with the technology because you made it yourself. However, it’s a big risk, because you’re also signing up to do *everything* yourself, whether you like it or not—and you may not have enough engineers or enough time to make it work as well as the off-the-shelf product.
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