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…
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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.
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