I work as an infrastructure engineer. And I was thinking the other day when I thought what actually makes up a “game engine”? A car engine is cylinders with pistons moving up and down. What is it that makes up a game engine? And if possible, what does that look like?
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This exact question was asked a couple days ago. Maybe go check that out? If you have any questions still after that, would love to answer.
The engine is a collection of program code building blocks for basic tasks that is shared among a lot of games, for example, reading 3D models in a particular format, mixing sounds with positioning in space and effects, interpreting input from gamepads and binding keys, outputting the image to an assortment of video card APIs. An engine can provide a high level scripting language for manipulating objects as distinct entities similar to how a player sees them, which is easier than writing C++ code to add new functionality.
An engine can so complete that the author of the game can load some models, skins and map files designed in a program supplied with the engine, to create a game with little programming. Such games built on the same engine usually feel similar to one another.
Its basically a collection of code which does not have to be written from scratch.
Every developer can take those libraries, physics or other parts to build their game without all the Math and algorithms behind it. Light, shadows, gravity and all that stuff is pretty hard to code. But with an engine you just have to change some values for your needs.
Most engines also support a lot of presets from other creators so you don’t have to model everything on your own.
A game engine is a software libary or framework that renders 3d scenes realy fast. Game developers using an engine only create the objects(aka assets) the game needs out of polygons and pass them to the engine, the engine then calculates all the shades, shadowws, physics and color of surfaces and prints them on your screen.
Many modern engines have lots of more features, they are editors for code and assets and you can create animations and quests and all that in the editors of the engine.
But the pure engine is just the computing graphics part.
The game engine for a game is like the server software (e.g. httpd or nginx or nodejs) for a webapp. The bit that deals with the basic concepts of being a game, into which you add the code and assets of the specific game you’re making.
Think of a game “engine” as the design philosophy/software that they use to build the game.
I.e. Designing a product in CAD vs designing a product in solidworks. Both programs work fine, but have different situations where one is better than the other. Or in some situations, the game company only has a license for one of them, so that’s what they use. When someone sends you a design that was made using CAD, you have to run CAD in order to view it. The same premise is (mostly) true for games.
You could also think of it like using legos vs using linkin logs, kinex, etc.
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