The Engine Drives the Game!

HagNasty · 06-30-2007, 05:36 PM

Ok, Here is a subject that go on forever! Game engines make creating games so much easier. In general anyway. They remove much of the tedious Low level code that drive people to madness. So What makes a good game engine?

For me there are a number of things. First it must be diverse. There are engines like source that are mostly geared toward FPS games. I much prefer engines for general game design. Though if you want to make a FPS go right ahead and hay, it's open source so why not.

Another thing is obviously the rendering pipeline. Games have to look good now a day to attract the largest market. Sadly I find this rules out more outdated engines like OGRE (actually it's only a graphics engine but easy enough to build upon)

And finally the last thing that is crucial in my opinion is ease of use. One thing that I do in my code is create functions that are easy to use and handle a lot of things. That way you only have to call createsound("filename"); and it creates the channel, loads the data, stores it in the list blah blah blah. This is something that makes programming very clean and easy to understand. Ad as long as you can access the elements directly after you still have full control. Also Documentation and learning curve fall under this as well. If it has these functions I find that it helps ease the learning curve a lot.

So I know there will be a lot of Source and Ogre fans saying yes you can use them for other game types or you can modify the pipeline for better graphics. I agree you can, It's just more work then I care to do

So what do people think are good engines. Open source, free ware or pay? What makes them good and what do you think makes a good engine.

Dominia · 07-02-2007, 12:43 AM

A point you missed I believe is support. With out a dedicated community to support it and make it grow on help forums, tutorials, example code from other games, the game engine might as well be dead.

That is why I've liked Irrlicht so far, good helpful community. It isn't the best open source engine but it is fairly lean and easy to use.

--Jason Hooten

HagNasty · 07-02-2007, 04:32 PM

Very true. Being able to use learn an engine is key. I kinda just rolled that up in documentation. One of the audio engines I love is FMOD because it has examples for multiple languages and awesome documentation as well as a superb online community.

I have One of the engines I am looking into is an up and coming engine that supports cross platform development called The Vicious Engine looks very promising has anyone tried this to see what it's support is like and how it works?

Gshonk · 07-02-2007, 09:55 PM

There is always Torque. I haven't used it much but I have heard its awesome.

fullmetal84 · 07-03-2007, 07:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gshonk

There is always Torque. I haven't used it much but I have heard its awesome.

It must be pretty good, Marc Mencher mentions they should learn it almost every time he responds to someone in his section.

DMINATOR · 07-03-2007, 12:15 PM

I think the good engine is the engine that is both easy and efficient to use by artists and programmers, and allows all of them to work well together.

A good engine should have set of tools, examples, documentation and should be easy and intuitive to use.

HagNasty · 07-13-2007, 05:27 PM

The only problem I have with torque is that it is built more toward 2d games then 3d games. Yes it has the capabilities but it's just harder. Also TorqueX (the XBox360 version) uses XNA framework. XNA also is not out of beta so is missing a lot as well.

I am actually looking into the viscous Engine some more and what it takes to program cross platform. It looks like it's mostly scripts but that would be limiting. I got in contact with them and have received a bunch of documentation I will go over tonight.

Actually on a lighter note, What about Flash. It is being incorporated into everything now a day. Adobe Flash CS3 ships with flash light 1.1. This is compatible with newer cellular phones and has a bunch of cellular emulators with it. It's not going to beat J2ME anytime soon but if you want a foot in the door that might be a viable option. I'm making a game demo with it for a meeting on the 19th in the Vortex Competition. we are in the finals.:P

http://vortexcompetition.org/