Game Engine Middleware

What is a Game Engine Middleware supposed to be?
1. a rendering engine
2. a physics engine
3. a network engine

Feature requirement:
1. Tools - World Editor
2. Tools - Visual Effect Editor
3. Tools - Character Editor
4. Tools - Level Editor
5. Tools -

The core functionality typically provided by a game engine middleware includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, and a scene graph. The process of game development is frequently economized by in large part reusing the same game engine to create different games.

Products:
1. http://www.3impact.com/ Free 3Impact Engine

• Crytek’s CryENGINE
• 
  
  Digital Extremes’ Evolution Engine 
• 
  
  Emergent Game Technologies’ Gamebryo
• 
  
  Epic Games’ Unreal Engine
• 
  
  Garage Games’ Torque
• 
  
  Id Software’s idTech
• 
  
  Terminal Reality’s Infernal Engine
• 
  
  Trinigy’s Vision
• 
  
  Unity Technologies’ Unity
• 
  
  Valve Corporation’s Source Engine
• 
  
  Vicious Cycle Software’s Vicious Engine

So for your reference throughout this data, our survey responders stated that they are currently working on titles for the following platforms:

Current development budgets for these titles fell largely into two lobes: under $4M, and over $16M. 42.2% of responders are working on titles costing less than $4 million, and 42.4% were over $16M.

  

The game engines with the most awareness from our responders were not a huge surprise, and both the technologists and producers had roughly the same level of awareness on all the engines. These were the top five:

However, asked which of these game engines they’ve actually used, the picture becomes more interesting (I’m leaving off the lower parts of the data purely for brevity):

how useful do the executives think they are for their current projects?

Using Game Engines

Backing up for a moment, why do we believe that people even want to use game engine middleware? If it is true that game engines are becoming more accepted by the industry, it should open up the market for more engine companies. Certainly the leading perception is that engine use is on the rise. But let’s check it out.

When asked if they are using game engine middleware on their project, our responders definitely indicate that engines are popular. 55% noted that they are currently using a licensed game engine on their title – that’s specifically an engine, not middleware libraries.

But when asked if they WANT to use game engines, the opposite results were returned:

Although the majority of our responders are using a middleware game engine, it appears that they would rather not! By this data, it appears that perhaps a thin game engine which adeptly integrates middleware libraries from other companies may find more acceptance in the marketplace than one which tries to do everything on its own. 

what are you using for rapid prototyping?”

But what script languages are most people using? (This query supported multiple replies.)

Making a Decision on Engines

The last thing I wanted to know from both producers and technologists was: What factors do they use in deciding whether to license a game engine, and which one to choose?

The overwhelming favorites were of course cost and time. If we purchase a game engine, we want to spend less money and time than we would have creating the engine on our own. Otherwise why would we bother? (We’ll talk about that question more in the upcoming production-oriented post!) In third position to money and time came genre relevancy, or making sure that the game engine works properly for the type of game you are creating. This emphasizes the importance of doing a thorough evaluation of any game engine you’re looking at, and knowing if a particular engine was already used for a game technologically similar to what you are planning to create (a first-person shooter, for example.) Also highly important to the responders was support and thorough documentation, a good-quality content pipeline, and the ability to easily integrate the game engine into one’s existing technology as well as with other middleware libraries.

Licensing a game engine is an important decision. Clearly many studios are doing it, and you should do a thorough evaluation of each candidate game engine before settling on one. Unfortunately there isn’t enough public information about most engines, so seeing a game similar to your own, or knowing people on other teams who have used a particular game engine for a title can go a long way to helping you with a decision. As we all focus more on rapid prototyping, rapid iteration, and live preview in content tools, we hope that the game engine creators are listening and will continue providing us the excellent tools we need to create amazing games. 

本文部分轉載自http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkDeLoura/20090302/581/The_Engine_Survey_General_results.php，版權歸原作者所有