Purposes of game engines

console – Mass Effect – originally used the unreal engine (developed by epic games) but later on, it started to utilise the assets that the frostbite engine (an in-house made EA engine that only companies that work for EA may use) the frost bite engine is possibly the best engine you can use, everything looks seamless and a pc with high enough specs make it look almost photo realistic. With it being an in house thing studios from bio ware, to DICE to ghost studios use, all having their speciality’s put in the engine. DICE built the original engine and made it look as close to flawless as they could but with the frostbite 4 engine in development all of EA’s studios have put there very specific skills, Ghost studios – the way cars work and how to make them work flawlessly within the game space.
Bio ware – a unique and diverse speech system (one of the best in the industry) and with them developing for big RPGS it means they need un bi-pedal creatures so they tweaked to allow that, allowing battle field to potentially have horses, dogs, any animal really not only that but it allows for stats, character perks things like that and with them having so much experience it’s close to flawless
DICE – built the groundwork the original frost bite was just used as an fps engine for battlefield bad company and forward, but due to it’s amazing animations it has become so much more with the current 20,000 people adapting and utilising it, which ultimately will serve it to be one of the best engines quite possibly made

mobile – The walking dead – uses tell tale tools engine, a custom built engine which allows the game to be ported to mobiles and other platforms with ease it also utilises a lua scripting language to help this

2d -

3d – Sauerbraten is a 3d polygon engine that utilises an in game editing system allowing seamless transition between real time play and real time editing. With it being free, whilst simplistic; almost minecraft like editing. Whilst everything originally placed is a cube but with it’s octree world design it lets the cube be broken down into eight, then any one of those block can be broken into eight and so on. The corners can be pushed or pulled to create curves. Some of the culling methods for a 3D engine similar to Sauerbraten are:

Graphics rendering techniques include:

BSP (binary space partitioning) – BSP is a method to recursively subdivide space into convex sets by hyperplanes. The subdivisions give rises to the representation of the scene with the creation of a tree data structure known as a BSP tree.
[Hyperplanes – something that has one less dimension than space]

portal based – Portal Culling is a method where the 3d space is broken into cells (rooms), which are linked together by portals (doors). These portals, are a window in the 3d space that allows objects in one specific cell to be seen from another. This version of culling is used better in scenes that are very enclosed like a building or a cave network due to it having limited use in scenes that utilise the open. In the diagram it shows rooms in a building, which illustrates how this way of culling works. The original camera frustum is seen in as the blue line. The shaded areas show what is visible after culling. The camera looks through a portal that goes through into the next cell, so the frustum is reduced (cyan colour shading) so it only renders graphics visible through the portal. With the reduced frustum is used to check the visibility of other additional port in other cells, it will be reduced even more, for each portal passed through (Red and green shading.) Even more cells are visible to the camera frustum but there is no direct line of sight so they are not considered for rendering. A game that utilises the effects of this method is rage, with it having lots of rooms in all its levels and with it being such a beautiful game, the effects of PBC are vital to keep a