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
What a game engine really does is offer a standard set of tools, for things like physics and rendering. You don’t want to re-invent the wheel for every single game. You’re right in saying you build the assets in another software, and that’s actually one of the things that a game engine handles too, importing and managing of assets.
However, those tools aren’t always one size fits all. Rockstar *does* try to reinvent the wheel for every game they make, and push the boundaries of what a video game is. To do this most effectively it’s best to run software they made almost completely in house.
For Cyberpunk 2077 it “crashed and burned” due to misuse of the tools at hand, it uses the same engine as The Witcher 3 which did spectacularly. I don’t know the specifics about why Cyberpunk did poorly but from how I understand it, it was horribly unoptimized, which can come from the art department, the programmers, or even underlying issues in the engine.
Generally, Unreal Engine is continuing to dominate the industry. UE5 can do pretty much anything, and if it *can’t* and you have the right connections, Epic can license out versions for you to modify so it can do what you need.
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