Game Industry Chain: Game Engine

Game Engine

In the field of game development , there is a special type of company. They do not make games (in other words, their main business is not to make games), but to develop a tool for making games: game engines .

The so-called game engine can be intuitively understood as a toolkit. Just like we use Photoshop to make a beautiful publication. Publications are equivalent to finished games, and Photoshop is similar to the role of a game engine. If we were to write the underlying code directly to make a publication, it would be a terrible workload. Similarly, if you have to write all the code for the game, it will be a nightmare job. Therefore, like the Unity engine, there is a slogan that sounds very moving: let people who can't write code can make games .

Game engines generally refer to 3D engines, because 2D engines are generally for personal use, such as Infinity, Aurora, etc., and are mostly used for specific purposes, and have little effect on the promotion of the entire game engine technology. Even if developers use third-party engines, it is difficult to get better results, such as Star Wars: Galaxy Battlefield, which was made with the Age of Empires 2 engine. The game engine has grown up with 3D shooting games.
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There are currently two mainstream commercial game engines: Unity and Unreal Engine (UE for short). Generally speaking, Unity is mostly used in mobile and lightweight games (such as the glory of the king, the original god), and Unreal is generally used in heavyweight masterpieces (such as the peace elite and most PC and console masterpieces).
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Epic games, the developer of Unreal, was originally a game company (well-known games include Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Fortnite, etc.). Founded in 1991. In 1998, developed the game Unreal (Unreal, a 3D first-person shooter). Thanks to a completely self-developed 3D game engine, the game was a great success. The company also commercialized Unreal Engine and competed fiercely with ID software's Quake series and had the last laugh. Subsequently, the second, third and fourth generations were introduced. Tencent acquired 48.4% of Epic's shares in 2012, making it the second largest shareholder after its founder.

Unity was founded in 2004 as a game company at the beginning. It developed the first game Gooball in 2005, but the game failed. Instead, by developing games, they found that the game engine is a good business. So in 2006, we first developed the engine for Mac, and then launched the first game engine on iOS in 2007. From then on, I took the Apple express train, and I couldn't deal with it. Later, it expanded from iOS to all platforms, and even the film, education, automotive and construction markets. Especially in the field of virtual reality and augmented reality, it is a well-deserved overlord.

In addition to these two, Cry Engine (CE) developed by Crytek in Germany is also a well-known third-party engine. Crytek was founded in 1999 and developed Far Cry and CE1 engines in 2003. Crysis and CE2 engines were introduced in 2006, and Crysis 2 and CE3 engines were introduced in 2009. CE4 and CE5 were subsequently introduced. The effect of the engine is against the sky, but according to the developers, it is not very friendly and difficult to use.

Valve has Source engine (origin), which is mainly used in its own games, from Half-Life, CS to survival, portal, including the current hot Dota 2. There are third-party games, but they lack real masterpieces.

In addition to these general-purpose engines, all major game companies basically have their own dedicated engines.

EA has the Frostbite cold engine developed by Sweden's DICE game studio (first used in the battlefield in 2008). However, it is basically limited to EA's internal use, without external authorization. Well-known masterpieces include Need for Speed, FIFA, Plants vs. Zombies, etc. It has evolved to the third generation and can be used for web game development. EA plans to unify its 13 previous engines (such as the Dead engine used in Dead Space, the Chameleon engine used in Need for Speed, and the Infinite/Aurora engine used in Mass Effect/Bald's Gate) into the Frost Engine.
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Ubisoft has a bunch of engines. There are Anvil/Anvilnext (Assassin's Creed), Disrupt (Watchdog), Snowdrop (The Blockade) developed by Massive Studio, Dunia (Far Cry), Yuti Snowman (Ghost Recon), Ubiart Framework (Child of Light).

Konani owns the Fox engine, developed by Hideo Kojima's team, and has masterpieces such as Metal Gear. Square Enix has Glacier 2 (Glacier 2 engine), as well as killer and other masterpieces. Sony has the Kinetica engine developed by Santa Monica (a well-known god of war).

Activision Blizzard has the Infinity Ward engine (infinite engine, IW for short), which is upgraded from ID Tech3 and used in the Call of Duty series.

R Star has Rage engine, mainly used in Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series.
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CD Projekt RED has the CDPR Red Engine, which is used in famous masterpiece wizards.

The originator of the 3D engine industry is the game god John Carmack . His Wolfenstein 3D (German headquarters, the first 3D engine), Doom (Doom, the first authorized 3D engine), Quake (Thor’s Hammer), Quake II, Quake III (ID Tech3), detonated the entire Engine market.

Since then, ID Tech and 3D Realms' Build engine (Duke of Destruction), Epic's Unreal Engine, and Monolith's Lithtech engine have competed fiercely. Later, due to problems such as poor compatibility with DirectX, ID was finally unable to support it and lost to Unreal Engine. Although ID Tech is still updating, it is no longer the mainstream of the general engine market. As a technical nerd, Carmack has successively opened up all old engines.
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Unreal Engine looked at the world, but did not expect the mobile market to fall from the sky, and Unity took Apple's ride and soared into the sky. In the end, I succumbed to ID and came to Unity. The two powers are still fighting for hegemony.

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Origin blog.csdn.net/weixin_52308504/article/details/111648243