The rapid development of hardware and system platforms provides a favorable foundation for game development. A game engine overview is introduced irst. Then, key features and available solutions of game engines are discussed. Typical products of game engines are shown and evaluated. Finally, we summarize our indings.Keywords: game engine, game builder, 3D game, 2D game, engine architecture
IntroductionGame engines are a new way to develop high-quality games easily and rapidly without needing intensive programming skills and computational resources. Today, there is growing interest in game engines due to the rapid development of hardware and system platforms.3D game engines help game companies reduce their cost, time, and manpower, since game developers can use the available functionalities of the engine. However, with over 100 engines available in the market for commercial and educational purposes, with a wide range of diverse features, each with its own performance levels, license types, and cost structures, selecting an appropriate game engine for a speciic purpose becomes a challenging problem.Game engine systems hit the headlines only a few years ago. Before the appearance of game engine technologies [1,2], existing systems were often developed as virtual augmented reality systems to handle speciic tasks such as NPSNET [3], DIVE [4], and SPLINE [5]. Thus, any modiication required a hard change in the programming environment and architecture. As game engine technology matures and becomes more lexible, implementing a 3D environment will become easier. Despite these improvements, programming skills remain a concern, and usually sabotage developers who want to create complex environments.© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Game developers usually have advanced programming skills and often block the system from user manipulation or misuse, which further complicates the task. Most game engines are limited to speciic tasks and their features are typically coupled with speciic game characteristics. Thus, developing extensions or modiications that force a game engine to adopt a new class of applications is almost impossible. Recently, many techniques and programming approaches such as virtual reality modeling language (VRML) [6] [10] have been proposed to overcome the limitations, brought about by the interconnected gaming engine and development platform, to ofer a beter solution.In this chapter, we evaluate the latest released game engine from a variety of aspects like modularity, performance, usability, library, speed, and the realism. The readers will obtain an overview of game engine research, while becoming familiar with the recent developments and technologies in this area.
Existing game engine solutionsAs technology moves forward, the need for mul...