Task 18: Elements of Game Technology, part one: game engines

In this blog entry I will be writing about game engines, how they vary, their advantages their disadvantages, usability and what games they support.

There are lots of game engines out there to pick and choose from but a lot of Games Company’s use their own in house engines this is due to the fact that the engine has been in use for a number of years, they have control over the whole direction the engine takes. They have a direct connection with the people improving their engine, bugs get fixed in a matter of days not months and also they can get access to improvements that haven’t been completely finished but could be helpful to the developers.

Here is a list of commonly known Game engines, the games on the engine and the Companies that use the engines.

Game engine	Games	Company
Unity	Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online GooBall Global Conflicts: Palestine Off-Road Velociraptor Safari WolfQuest Dead Frontier Battlestar Galactica Online	Cartoon Network Electronic Arts Over The Edge Entertainment Serious Games Interactive Flashbang Studios Eduweb Mikesgames Productions Bigpoint and Artplant
CryEngine 3	Crysis 2 ASTA: The War of Tears and Winds ArcheAge Cabal 2 Class 3 Forged by Chaos Nexuiz Ryse Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 Tour Golf Online Warface	Crytek Polygon Games XL Games ESTsoft Undead Labs Panzar Studio Xaviant IllFonic City Interactive OnNet
id Tech 4	Doom 3 Quake 4 Prey Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Wolfenstein	id software Raven Software Human Head Studios Splash Damage
RAGE	Midnight Club: Los Angeles Grand Theft Auto IV Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis Red Dead Redemption	Rockstar Games
Source engine	Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Alien Swarm Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines Sin Episodes Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Zeno Clash Vindictus / Mabinogi: Heroes KOS Secret Operations	Valve Troika Games Ritual Entertainment Arkane Studios ACE Team devCat (Nexon)
Unreal Engine 3	America's Army 3 Batman: Arkham Asylum Borderlands Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway BlackSite: Area 51 Gears of War Gears of War 2 Gears of War 3 Unreal Tournament 3 Rainbow Six Vegas Lost Odyssey Mass Effect Mass Effect 2 Mass Effect 3 The Last Remnant Medal of Honor: Airborne Blade & Soul Bulletstorm	Eidos Interactive Gearbox Software Midway Games Epic Games Ubisoft Mistwalker BioWare Square-Enix NCsoft People Can Fly

The unreal engine has a lot of Games company’s using the engine this is due to its ease of use and its amazing features. The games that have been made in the unreal engine have been amazing and most have won awards for how good they were. Batman Arkham Asylum won and was nominated for loads of awards from sites like giant bomb, game informer, game trailers and games radar. It also won a BAFTA for game of the year and the studio won spikes Studio of the year.

The unreal engine can be heavily modified as its core is written in C++, it was originally used for first person shooters but then it has subsequently developers have made stealth, MMORPGS and RPG’s games using the unreal engine.  Unreal engine 3 is designed for Xbox 360, windows, windows vista, windows 7, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Wii U, iOS, Android and Adobe flash player. This means it’s one of the most versatile engines around. A lot of the gaming code is written in the Unreal Script a lot of gameplay can be shaped and moulded with going to deep into the internals of the engine.  The engine has come a long way since the first Unreal Engine 1. Here is a comparison between the engines and the character models of the unreal tournament games.

The CryENGINE is another huge engine like the Unreal Engine and was primarily used for  first person shooter games. Crytek used a technology demo called Far Cry they then realised and saw its potential and started to turn it into a game after progressing the engine Ubisoft bought the rights for the Far Cry franchise. Crysis was developed for the CryENGINE 2 and when it was released it was unfeasible for computers to run on its highest or even average settings. As the computers became better the game was used as a benchmark tester to see if you had a good computer or not.

The CryENGINE 3 was announced at GDC in 2009 and it was announced that the engine was being developed for Microsoft windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and even the Wii U. Crysis 2 was also created on the CryENGINE 3 and was a multiplatform game which helped other developers see the potential in using the CryENGINE for use on the consoles.

I must say I prefer the Unreal Engine due to its ease of use, is kismet system which allows you to alter the Gameplay scripting and this is very easy to use as it is uses nodes. This helps bring life to our levels and or models.