What actually is a game engine, and how do they differ from one another? (e.g. Unreal Engine vs Cryengine)

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What actually is a game engine, and how do they differ from one another? (e.g. Unreal Engine vs Cryengine)

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Think of the game engine like a medium, or a canvas, a computer world where the laws of physics have been made, but it’s completely, or very nearly, empty. Even though it’s called an engine, it’s all just computer programming.

Once you have your engine, the game developer then comes in to create the world within that model, molding the landscape, adding objects and characters, painting it, as well as adding music, dialogue, and story, as well as the specific game rules.

Different game engines may be written in different coding languages, or have different capabilities as far as what can be modeled in the game, and how fast the game can be (also dependent on your computer as well), as well as what kinds of games can be used by the engine, and what consoles the engine can be used in.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A game has “assets” – NPC’s, scenery, vegetation, buildings, furniture, clutter, weapons, armor, vehicles, etc. All of these are stored in nice little files and make up about 90% of the game size, the gigabytes you have to download to install the game.

The game engine is the core program that sets up all these assets so they look like a game rather than a collection of art assets. NPC’s move and interact, trees sway in the wind, buildings allow entry and exit etc., weapons function, armor can be put on and taken off, etc. It’s the job of the engine to make all of that work.

The various engines differ in how they do that job (programming language) and how they’re optimized. Some engines are optimized for small indoor areas, others for large open geography and huge armies, others for 3D movement like flying in space and landing on planets, etc.

Sometimes a game will use one engine to let you fly in space, and another to let you walk around on a planet after you’ve landed.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In programming things are built up in layers. Instead of coding everything in binary, we build languages. Instead of reinventing code, we create libraries of reusable code to use on new projects.

A game engine follows the same idea. It’s basically a big toolbox that full of tools for building a game. It’s a little more complicated than that, for example, some tools depend on other in complex ways that make it so you can’t necessarily just hack two engines together, but that’s basically it.

All these tools are generally jammed together into one big program that acts to not only hold all the tools, but also to compile or outright run the game, and often a code editor and GUI elements to help developers.