Video game engines (what they have) Assignment 1/2

Purpose of Game engines

A game engine is a form of system designed to develop and create video games. Game engines are a form of frame work that the video game developers use to code their games without having to create absolutely everything from scratch; this includes lighting, physics, AI, collision detection, rendering, cameras and lots of other tools for the company’s game to use. It is safe to say that more or less every video game of today’s generation uses some form of game engine, these can be ones constantly re-used over many different games or, alternatively, a development team can create their own game engine from mostly scratch for one game specifically. A game engine includes certain things, here is what they do:

Graphic rendering – Graphic rendering is how the game (quite clearly) renders itself, what you see on the screen from enemies to obstacles the game’s engine has had to graphically render it as you see it, this is why we get texture pop-ups when it has loaded quick enough. This is normally found in 3D games more so than in 2D games, as 2D games (take the legend of Zelda for example) only have to render one cube of information at a time, giving it a much smoother outcome then a PC game running on high specs with a low graphics card. In some games it has to use real-time rendering for shadows as the day goes by, like how in red dead redemption everything will cast some form of shadow eventually as the sun move across the sky.

 

Collision detection- Collision detection is simply the game engine realizing what has been hit, by what and in some cases where. Examples would be how in super Mario brothers jumping on a goombas head will result in its death but running head first into the goomba will result in Mario’s untimely demise. Projectiles in games normally affect certain things; like in Grand theft auto IV when shooting a gas canister it will explode but when walking into it the canister simply falls on the ground, Or how in super Mario kart hitting a boost ramp will make the car go faster for a short time because it detected the collision between the two necessary objects. 

 

Artificial intelligence (or AI) - Artificial intelligence is in every single game that contains something the player has to do or has to face , pong’s other paddle had a form of AI when going near the ball, every game with any enemy in it has AI, be it some more advanced than others like left 4 dead’s “advanced zombie AI” which see’s it so that the zombies of the game (no matter what is in their way) will always find a way to intercept the players constant movement. The game itself will also use it’s AI to try and guess where the player is going to go, like how upon receiving a quest or objective that’s in another place, the game will try and render the world or level going to the quest to save time.

 

 

Sound- Every game that isn’t some form of art game normally comes with sound, and the games engine provides preset ones (like the sound of gun fire and such) or has the ability to accept developer created ones and know under what circumstances to play them. Like how is the Metal gear solid series the alert noise will only ever play if snake has been spotted by the enemy to let you know you’ve done something wrong, or when you collect a ring in sonic a small ‘chime’ sound will play. Sound in video games also, quite logically, gets louder the closer you get to a noise, like in assassin’s creed how you can hear the muttering of people who are right next to you quite clearly and you can only hear the merchant yelling in the distance as if he was doing just that; yelling thing the distance. 

 

Physics- Game engines also come with a form of preset physics, be it rope physics, vehicle physics or whatever type of physics that game engine has, physics can cover say, how a car can crash into something at different speeds in a racing game like in Need for speed can have an immensely different effect depending if the car goes into the object at 80 miles an hour rather than 2 miles an hour. But in most cases game developers will simply get a separate engine for physics, like the havock engine or PhysX are some of the most common ones for game physics. These physics engines are specifically designed for advanced physics; such as thing like water flow, and how being next to an explosion will take you right off your feet and send you flying into a wall (much like in grand theft auto IV) but seeing the explosion at a distance will have no effect on you other then hearing a small noise as if it was in the distance.