Task 17. Engines

Game engines are used by companies to create their games with reduced cost and complexity. The engine itself contains key features to make a game meaning the company does not need to create everything for scratch. It seems that first person shooters seem to be producing the most engines and the mods using these engines would be proof of that. Popular games engines include the half life and half life 2 engine along with the counter strike engine and the unreal engine.

Some companies will not just use an all in one engine and will take separate engines for different areas, like music and rendering, and combine the engines to create a custom engine. Games engines also allow cross platform creation allowing little to no changes to the code to be made but the game can be played on multiple platforms and operating systems.

The pictures below show an image with no filter then with additive alpha and then subtractive alpha.

Additive is the mixing of 2 colours while subtractive is to do with light passing through a colour.

With next gen arriving at our doorstep it means that games engines must now improve in order to handle the higher level of processing and detail that will be in these new games, also this means that it is much harder and much more expensive to create everything from scratch due to the complexity and higher detail these games will be capable of. This would then lead me to believe that all companies will have to use engines in order to produce their games otherwise it will be too expensive to do.