Game Engines

[Kyle_Katarn]

Havok Physics and Animation Engines
Havok announced in February an Intel-sponsored PC version of our award-winning physics and animation products for download at no charge. The products are now available!
(Taken from the Havok Website)

This is truly exciting times. Our C++ teacher is getting aquainted with the Engine, and will be teaching us to use it in our second year.

Download Havok

[Talon]

Havok isn't an engine as such, all it does is handle the physics and the animations in your game engine.

[Tank]

Maybe I overlooked it but I didn't see anyone posting the "UNITY" Game Engine here:

UNITY: Game Development Tool

The Positive: Deployment for Mac, Windows, Web-Deployment and Widget Deployment. The latest news is that you now create games for the Wii by using UNITY. Oh and almost forgot that you can use Unity to develop for the iphone as well (that is however still in beta as I believe).

The Negative: No Windows version as of yet. You will need a Mac at the moment in order to use the Unity Engine. Rumors has it though that they are working on a Windows port.

[ShinobiZen]

Hi guys!

My favorite is the Quest3D v4. I use this in my work mainly for my demo and actual output or either realty, games, movies, and other interactive presentations. I definitely would recommend this to everyone.

Quest3D Allows us to publish our work either the web or just a simple executables.

Try it out:
Welcome! - Quest3D - This is the main website
Quest3D Demos - Quest3D - some demo sites

[tigger]

thought i may as well post this due to the several new developments, and the release of blender 2.48


blender's game engine has recently advanced a LOT, with glsl shaders (normal maps etc.), enhanced physics, logic editing etc. and in-game soft

pros: easy to use, especially if you know blender already,
VERY quick to use (due to no compiling etc. to get in-game, just press P and go)
cross-platform (linux,mac,windows,+ a bunch of different/obscure os's)
logic brick/python based coding
bullet physics
all the advantages of blender, and in particular, the advantage of using the same program for almost every aspect of game creation.

if you would like an example of what blender's game engine can do, check out the apricot project,
Yo Frankie!, the open game based on the recent open film, Big Buck Bunny (which you should also check out, because it's awesome)

For a list of new features in 2.48, Click Here.

[Tiros]

I gotta say, there's been a lot of mentioning about Blender lately.. So either, Blender's really good, or the people using it are nutcases. And seeing as the only one in my class using blender is one (in a good way tho'), I'm kinda leaning towards the second alternative

No, well, it has improved a lot I guess by the looks of it. But you got to think about the cons aswell.. Being that (from what I know) It's not a very popular tool in game-studios. Also, Using the Blender-engine might not really be the same thing as using the engine for a real produced game.

Then again, that's what I think, as I'm not certain of those two points. But tigger, if you give us the pros, then give us the cons, or we won't belive you

Cheers!

[nfollmer]

Originally Posted by Tiros

I gotta say, there's been a lot of mentioning about Blender lately.. So either, Blender's really good, or the people using it are nutcases. And seeing as the only one in my class using blender is one (in a good way tho'), I'm kinda leaning towards the second alternative

No, well, it has improved a lot I guess by the looks of it. But you got to think about the cons aswell.. Being that (from what I know) It's not a very popular tool in game-studios. Also, Using the Blender-engine might not really be the same thing as using the engine for a real produced game.

Then again, that's what I think, as I'm not certain of those two points. But tigger, if you give us the pros, then give us the cons, or we won't belive you

Cheers!

I am an old blender user. I haven't touched it in awhile, but here are my thoughts (and to keep it on topic, I will discuss the engine also ):

Pros:

- It's free
- Most of it's tools are very easy to use (once you learn the interface, which is where most people stop)
- It's open source so the community can help with updates and new features.
- It has sculpting tools, its no Zbrush, but it gets the job done.
- It's baking tools are a lot easier to use than MAX's. (It's the only reason I keep Blender around, I can get a normal, AO, etc.... map out of it in half the time.
- Very good community.
- The internal renderer is actually very good, but the Yafray/Yaf(a)ray renderer is even better, and it's pretty well integrated.
- Add all the other Pro's tigger said

Cons:
- Yes, the engine supports GLSL, but every game I have seen using it runs at framerates below 10 FPS. The code needs optimized.
- It lacks good documentation. Most of the manuals you will find online are a few versions behind, and some tools have changed.
- It doesn't handle hi poly models too well. (Blender in general, not the engine :P)
- The Source Engine seemed to hate every model that came out of it.
- UE3 would take the models, but sometimes I had to export a few times to get them to look right (most wouldn't take lights and just be completely black.)
- Usually when I export an OBJ out of it, it doesn't get all the faces.


Blender has potential, and in the right hands, it's very powerful. I think a lot of the "haters" tried using Blender when it just came out and was terrible. It has come a long way and for a free modeler, its the best around. But I'm swaying dangerously off-topic, so I'll end it here. Please don't turn this into a Blender thread

[Jimi]

I've used Doomsday and Darkplaces...

Doomsday:
Enhanced (classic) Doom engine.

Pros:
+ Only need a text editor to change basic stuff (like monster health, animations, etc)
+ Support for 3d models (with LOD)
+ Easy to make nice particle effects (support for point, line, textured and model particles)
+ Dynamic lighting
+ Simple/easy level editing
+ Coloured & smoothed sector lighting for levels (the smoothed is a bit wip)
+ Support detail and shiny textures
+ Can play Doom, Heretic and Hexen (support for other Doom engine games coming sometime?)
+ 3D sounds and reverb effects based on the room materials
+ Multi platform (win, linux, mac)

Cons:
- Model format limited to MD2/DMD
- An object can only have max 8 models (which sometimes hasn't felt enough)
- Not much updates lately (but it's not dead)
- Need to know C if you really want to modify the game
- Old (as in the way some of you might take the pros for granted)


Darkplaces:
Enhanced Quake engine.

Pros:
+ QuakeC to alter the game
+ Support MDL, MD2, MD3 and DPM model formats (DPM model got a skeleton)
+ Support for Q1BSP, HL1BSP and Q3BSP
+ GLSL, normal maps, bump maps, parallax bumps, gloss maps, glow maps, alpha maps, reflections
+ Q3 Shaders
+ Support for 8 channel sounds
+ Multi platform (win, linux, mac)

Cons:
- Some QuakeC features seems to be rather undocumented
- I haven't found any documentation on how to make particle effects, and it feels very awkward to make particle effects
- No effects for the sounds (all sounds sound the same where ever you are)
- HL1BSP seems to have some issues with monster bounding box sizes (no idea if it's fixed now)
- Q3 Shaders seems to be limited

[Lee Fan]

As a Crysis Modder and a Blender Game Engine user (BLENDER BOY!!)

I honestly have to say that the differences between the CryEngine 2 and Blender Game Engine is relatively small for those who have a modern graphics card and decent machine specs - on a practical level. Blender game engine is not optimized well for low to mid-low level hardware. Either you're going to get 30fps on very simple scene with your "not so good 2 year old laptop" or you will get 230 fps on relatively complex scene including realtme shadows, softbodies, normal maps etc. scene with your 8800GT (which aren't that expensive anymore).

This is why many people test blender on mid level or low level GPUs and are turned off by bad performance. But the truth is that blender's performance is quirky in that it's pretty nonoptimal until you cross the threshold equivelent of a 8800GT graphics card with a decent CPU and RAM. Then it's an engine easily as powerful as the state of the engines during the release of Doom3, Team Fortress 2, BIOSHOCK, FEAR , World of Warcraft, and GuildWars only with more modern physics such as soft bodies and other advances since the time of those engines. Honestly BGE on a $1200 gaming PC has more graphical prowess than an XBOX360, Wii, and in many cases over PS3 games. Easily.

I mean look at Saint's Row II and Fallout3, BGE could totally handle those graphics and technical demands minus one limitation... currently the one thing holding back it's true performance that it could have is the total utter complete lack of a occlusion culling / native built in LOD system. If it had those two things it would be unequivolically more powerful than all the consoles on a decent PC, I beleive.

The blender devs are no dummies I'm pretty sure they are aware of the need to implement solid occlusion culling. I hope so anyway. To get that in within the next 4-6 months would be earth shattering.

There is a reason why people love blender so much. It's because you can actually talk to the devs personally. And like tell them they rock and stuff. And then they like, give you more features and stuff it's really cool.



CryEngine 2 vs. Blender Game Engine


I. Wide Open Areas
Now CryEngine 2 has lot's of occlusion culling which means that you can have wide open areas and stuff. However, wideopen areas don't automatically lend themselves to cool gameplay. So if you beleive that cool gameplay and beautiful graphics does not require sprawling vistas with realtime oceans and volumetric clouds tehn as I've already stated there isn't much difference between the 2 engines on a *practical level*.

II. Real-Time Ambient Occlusion and SubSurfaceScattering

CryEngine 2 has realtime AO and SSS. However these two features can easily be faked in BGE by baking AO to your textures and then by adjusting the emit value on your materials. Seriously. Changing the emit value on yoru material in blender game engien looks almost EXACTLy the same as when you adjust the subsurface scattering level inside of CryEngine 2. So much so that Im' beginning to beleive that they are actually teh same thing with two different names. And the ambient occlusion looks exactly the same minus the fact that CE2 has weird "ribbons" that appear over everything with AO prescent when BGE doesn't because it's not realtime but instead it's baked. The "ribbons" aren't necessarily bad, in fact I think they are cool, they remind me of the "ribbons" that you'll see if you look at a FF7 battle scene rendered on an oldfashion cathode color TV. It's actually a cool effect but definately not necessary or realistic.

III. The Editor

CryEngine 2's shining star in this category are the phenomenol Flowgraphs. When I mention flowgraphs in a blender forum people are very skeptical, (people who've never used CE2's flowgraphs...grrrrr). But they are really fantastic and very fun to work in at least for me. But not only that, flowgraphs feel more powerful than scripting but that could just be me. And the fact that i coded abotu 10% of an entire RPG battle system in about 12hours using flowgraphs. Never once did i have to look up syntax. It was like a logic puzzle pure and simple with no fore knowlege of any particular language being required. It was very liberating for me personally.

However, the rest of the cake has to be given to blender as blender has sclupting, modeling, rigging, animating, texturing, normals painting, rendering, baking, basically the whole enchelate right there with the game engine. And until you've played with this, you will probably always be skeptical of it, just as those people who are ignorant of Crytek's flowgraphs will probably always be skeptical of that remarkable feature.

I'm tired, I'm going to bed. I could type more though.