I hear it everywherere “this game is gonna use that engine” … Google doesn’t seem to give me a good explanation, so here I am…
In: 1094
Engine usually refers to a physics or graphics engine. In other words, the engine is the complex set of mathematical and physical equations, or calculations, that the game will use to make this look nice and behave well.
Even simple, the engine in a game is much like the engine in a car. It makes it go
think of it as what the game is built on.
the engine handles lighting, physics, logic etc.
most PS2 games used the renderware engine, that’s why they mostly play and look so similar.
Rockstar uses the RAGE engine for example. that’s what powered GTA4, GTA5, Red Dead etc.
I should stop answering questions when I’m sleepy, I hope this makes sense. I did try to explain it like you’re 5
Engines do everything I don’t want to do making a game.
They give you the framework to build on so you aren’t reinventing how to render a circle on screen, or how to interact with the graphics card, or how to simulate two objects hitting each other.
I want to design my game play experience, not reinvent the same problem that exists in every game.
Computers use maths to draw pictures on the screen. In fact, that is all they *can* do. Even a highly sophisticated video game requiring the computer to draw 120 extremely complicated pictures per second onto your screen – in the end, every pixel of every picture is the product of some mathematical computation.
When someone makes a video game, very very rarely do they write all the formulas and functions out themselves and from scratch. Over the years, we’ve developed software that combines very efficient and versatile packages of maths that draw pictures onto the screen, and outfitted those packages with a user interface, so you can skip a lot of the mathematics and go right into the creative part. That’s a game engine.
Let’s say I want to build a diorama. I’m not likely to make my own cardstock, my own glue, my own markers. I will go to a crafts store and gather all the tools and materials for my project.
In this metaphor, a game engine is the crafts store.
You don’t want to sit down and program every single basic part of a game. So you buy/use a thing where someone already programmed all the boring parts. So like, you don’t have to program your own lighting, you just use the lighting system unity made
In the old days, programmers completely built their games from the ground up. That was a lot of work but doable at the time.
At some point graphics became very important, and games became more graphically complex. You needed to walk in a rendered 3D surrounding, have motion effects, have opponents move around a map, have the ability to jump, crawl, have gravity et cetera.
And developers realised this was a huge amount of work. But they could cheat. By separating game content (the graphics and story) from the mechanics (the code needed to display and interact with it) they could reuse a large part in any future game. So after ID Studio released Quake in the ’90s for instance, they reused all the mechanics in their next games as well. They called this the Quake engine. And realized they could sell the engine to other companies and profit even more. Same goes for the Unreal engine.
Nowadays some of these engines are open source and can be used by anyone, making life easier for game developers. The requirements are so high these days, that without an engine, you would not be able to make a competitive action game anymore.
Essentially the ‘base’ of most games which they then build off of into games. Usually graphics and developer tools is the biggest deciding features of game engines as 3D graphics and tool development has become so incredibly advanced, that building it from scratch would take *a long* time. Most game engines today range from 15 to 25 years old. A common misconception is that Unreal 4 is a new engine from Unreal 5, but they are the same, just updated.
The issue with game engines is that they come with features that are hard to remove which can negatively affect performance or force workflows you don’t want to follow, thats why you can make your own engine, building off of a framework(a far more naked base, essentially) or entirely from scratch to cram as much efficiency as possible. This is feasible if your game is 2D.
However in those cases it might happen that the engine *is* the game, when the engine is so hyperspecialized for a particular game, such as the games Noita and Factorio. As a matter of fact, Unreal Engine to this day, still has some code from back when it was the game *Unreal Tournament*. So it goes to show that the line between game and engine isn’t that sharp.
Think of it like a motored vehicle. You have an engine which is attached to whatever you want to do with the motion it generates. You can add some wheels ant turn it to a car, or add some spinning blades and wings to turn it to a plane. The videogames would be the car and the plane, but both are using the same engine for different purposes.
The engine is the underlying software that supports the assets and scripting that allow the game to work.
It’s what detects that you’re pressing a button and has been told which model plays what animation as a result. It’s basically a collection of functions that are premade without any specific game in mind that can be used as a jumping off point so that developers don’t need to write their own code for how to render 3D graphics, or for pairing up animations with models, or program camera controls and all the other stuff that every video game does.
Borderlands 3 and Kingdom Hearts 3 both run on Unreal Engine 4, which means that once you strip away all the art assets and game specific code that their studios wrote you’re left with the same piece of software that was built to support video games.
Let’s think of this with an over simplified example. A car engine:
A car’s engine relies on a series of inputs, and from those inputs it produces predictable outcomes (or outputs).
If you press on the throttle (input) it leads the engine to intake air and fuel, and produces heat, exhaust and motion (outputs). What you do with those outputs is up to you.
Many “super car “ manufacturers don’t manufacture their own engines, they use engines developed by others (BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, etc..).
So you can think of a game using a graphics engine as just that, a prepackaged module that you can use to build your game. Your inputs (in this case your unique game code) tell the engine to do something it’s developer had already figured out for you (just like your throttle press makes the engine rev, the engine maker figured out how to do that) and from there the output of the engine is something you can work with – like draw an open world.
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