Game engines have been paving the way for loads of companies
starting in the games industry. They are like digital canvases but for 3D
artists, it gives the ability to go beyond just a 2d painting or a plain 3d
model, with engines you can create whole new unimaginable worlds with these.
They are a powerful tool in the hands of a game artist so
it’s important to learn about different types engines, and learn what they can
do, as in the games industry new inventions and innovative programs keep
getting released and updated very quickly so the limit of what one can do with
these engines keeps going higher and higher as technology develops.
So what kind of engines are there?
Well there are a lot of them, and many of them are dependent
on a company buying the rights and licenses to use it so some companies try to
create their own engine if they have a specialised game they are working on,
say an MMORPG like World of Warcraft or a game like Battlefield 3-4 which uses
the Frostbite engine.
 |
| Frostbite 3 Engine - Used by DICE for Battlefield games |
These are called
in-house game engines, which are only accessed by the company itself, while it
may be very tedious and long to code and develop these engines, it makes it
easier for the artists and developers to work faster and easier on creating the
game. It also means if they have a new idea they want to implement, or they
have any bugs that they need to fix, they can just update their engine quickly
in house without relying on any external companies to do so.
 |
| HPL Engine used in Amnesia the Dark Descent |
Recently there have been engines that have been released to
the public to create their own games and worlds/levels. Which is awesome
because that means everyone can learn how to use a game engine, as there are
lots of tutorials and articles online about them.
I’m just going to go
through the ones I’m most familiar with and have used or seen first-hand.
Let’s start with the UDK Engine (Unreal Development Kit)
I used this engine at the end of the first year to make a
small scene with all the assets I created during the year. It was easy to get
your head around it once you knew the basics. Though it didn’t have real time
rendering for dynamic lighting. So that meant you had to create and patch up
any lighting errors that occurred using light-maps which aren’t that hard to
do, but they can become tedious to do over and over again. So while it had a
very easy interface and terrain editing options, the lighting issues were sort
of annoying to deal with.
 |
| UDK Engine Scene |
But it does mean that it can run on slower computers
since all the rendering isn’t real-time, hence it doesn’t need as much
graphical and computing power as it would for a more advanced lighting engine.
Although why it isn’t the most advanced, it does mean that the lighting can be
controlled manually which means that it is a really good engine for any games
that want to use a stylised art style instead of opting for the traditional
hyper-realistic game environment.
After doing a bit
more research on the UDK engine, I found out this was version of Unreal Engine
3, but a Service Development Kit for it created by Epic games, Hence the name
UDK. It was released in 2009 November and according to the EULA, “game
developers can sell their games by paying Epic games the cost of $99 USD, and
25% rotalty on UDK related revenure above $50,000 from all UDK-based commercial
applications.” So it isn’t entirely free to make and release your own game but
it’s pretty good.
I also found out that UDK, really specialises in creating
FPS and Third Person Shooter games, and that any other types of games such as
MMO’s for example would require a lot more insight and research into how the
engine actually works, it’s great for creating worlds and designing levels,
however since it isn’t very well documented, when it comes to the programming
and coding part of it, it is a lot more difficult and tedious to get your head
around how this works and to implement updates and changes to the code, it’s
not impossible to create different types of games but it could be done a lot
faster with a different engine.
Another Engine which is free to use is CryEngine 3 which is
a more advanced engine, I remember seeing it for the first time when the 3rd
years from last year were using this engine, and I’ve got to say it looks a lot
more visually stunning than UDK, it has real time lighting, so it does take a
lot more computing power but, if you want to create realistic worlds with
awesome lighting that you still can change and control, I would opt in for this
engine. 
It has been used to create blockbuster games, movies and
high-quality simulations. It’s the only engine that has an “all-in-one game
development solution for PC, Xbox 360 and the PS3” which is very handy for
porting over games. It currently is the fastest high-end renderer in the world
which is why it probably produced the most visually stunning blockbuster games
like the Crysis series and Ryse: Son of Rome.
We all got to use it for our group project this year, since
everyone is doing the Off the Map Brief. I have to say while it’s very visually
impressive, the UI and getting your way around the program is a lot more
tedious than UDK, it definitely feels a lot more advanced, probably suited for
a programmer or someone who likes a lot of statistics and data. I did start to
miss the simplicity of the UDK UI and how easy it was to navigate that engine
compared to this one. Just bringing in assets and applying materials to them
are a lot more tedious than UDK, but at least you don’t have to create light
maps so I guess there is that exchange, however the unreal 4 engine which is
different from UDK was released not long ago, and I think it’s a good contender
for Cry engine, it has that nice simple UI that UDK has and it has awesome
lighting just like Cry engine, it even generates light maps automatically!
 |
| Crysis 3 Environment - Beautiful Visuals in Cryengine 3 |
There are many other engines out there that offer different
features and bring more to the table but this is all I’m going to discuss about
for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment