Task 4: Personal Enquiry
I’m going to talk about game engines as they interest me the
most because of how the new age of gaming is more open to public and the
ideology of creating new developers, even though the first couple of engines
were based on hard code from ground up. Mostly 2D. Before that the games were
written in specific code for example a game for Atari 2600, designed only specifically
for that hardware because of optimization for display. This idea was used by
many companies in the golden age of arcade games because developing an in house
engine was an only option. However there were 2D game ‘creation systems’ in the
1980s; war-game construction kit, shoot’ em up construction kit etc.
Then in 1990 the birth of 3D graphics opened new options of
engine development. The start of the engines came from the idea of using the
base code of the previous ‘game’ and developing your own graphics. From there
when id software’s Quake 3 arena and unreal were made with an open source code.
Which the engine and the content were developed separate. This is where unreal
engine rose from that time. ID tech 4 was still popular but the flexibility of
unreal made it very popular and took the lead.
Game engines are written with an API (application
programming interface), such as Direct 3D or OpenGL, which creates the
graphical aspect of the game engine, it’s what draws the image on the screen.
The game engine can be written in any programming language such as C++, C or
Java.
The first
ever game engine doom engine also formally known as id tech 1. Made doom and
doom 2; now the other games developed with the same engine was Hexen: Beyond
Heretic; Heretic etc. They were made by licenses from id tech to develop the
games using their engine.
However
unreal still being the best engine at the time of id tech 1 because of its modular
engine architecture and it had an understandable scripting language which was
easy to modify and alter. Its popularity was at its peak with the release of
Unreal Tournament. Being outstandingly playable with network performance with
Direct 3D and open GL.
However today
there are still a lot of 2D game engines that are very capable of doing a lot
of awesome things; starting with the doom engine (id tech 1) it was 2.5D
however its still mostly 2D rendering 2D sprites that are constantly facing the
player. However now even 3D game engines are able to do 2D and 2.5D graphics,
such as unreal engine 3 and 4 and unity which is a popular choice among indie
developers. An engine im familiar with is construct 2D which I used in college,
it has potential to create any type of 2D game you desire; havin advanced
features such as physics capabilities and virtual coding; And the ultimate
popular game maker: studio which is idealy the same as contruct but has a easy
learning curve and it costs are very financially good.
Today 2D
games and 3D games are being produced however 3D having an edge over 2D because
some gamers say, ‘2D is so last year’. However in my opinion it’s the game
design and mechanics which can make any game good, despite the fact its 2D or
3D.
referance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame_Construction_Set
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot%27Em-Up_Construction_Kit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine
No comments:
Post a Comment