The Unreal Engine
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games and initially illustrated in the 1998 FPS Unreal. Though the engine was primarily developed with FPSs in mind, it has since been successfully used in a variety of genres, including RPGS, MMORPGS and stealth games.
The code for the Unreal Engine was written in C++ and features a high degree of portability. As a result, the Unreal Engine is a valuable tool used by many game developers today.
The Unreal Engine has had 4 generations to date:
The Unreal Engine 1 - The first engine produced by Epic Games integrated rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networking, scripting and file system management into one complete package. The Engine became popular due to the modular engine architecture and the inclusion of a scripting language which in turn made it easy to mod including full conversions of games such as Tactical Ops, a port of Unreal Tournament which was rewarded with its own retail release.
The Unreal Engine 2 - The second version of the Unreal engine made its debut in 2002 alongside America's Army. The new generation of Unreal Engine saw the core code and rendering engine completely re-written. Additionally, UE2 featured UnrealEd 2, a map editor tool, which was followed shortly after by UnrealEd 3.
Among the final builds of the UE2 were the UE2.5 builds. These later engines included improvements to rendering performance and added vehicle physics, a particle system editor for UnrealEd, and 64-bit support in Unreal Tournament 2004.
The Unreal Engine 3 - The third generation of the Unreal Engine was designed for DirectX as well as systems using OpenGL, including PS3, OS X, iOS, Android, Stage 3D for Adobe Flash Player 11, JavaScript/WebGL, PlayStation Vita and Wii U. With the use of an advanced renderer the engine supported many advanced techniques, such as HDRR, per-pixel lighting, and dynamic shadows whilst also building on the tools available in previous versions.
As well as being used as part of the games industry, UE3 has also seen adoption by many non-gaming projects like Lazy Town (during filming to generate virtual sets infront of a green screen), the animation software 'Muvizu Play', and in March 2012 the FBI licensed the Unreal Development Kit to use in a simulator for training.
The Unreal Engine 4 - The fourth in the Unreal Engine series was targeted at the eighth generation of PC hardware and consoles (Xbox One, PS4 etc). one of the major features of UE4 is real-time global illumination using voxel cone tracing, eliminating pre-computed lighting. UE4 also showcases new features aimed at developers to reduce iteration time and allow for direct updating of C++ code. There are also new features for a visual scripting engine called 'Kismet', these new features allow for developers to directly visualise code whilst testing. This then allows for the developer to jump to the source code and edit it, elements in the game can also be clicked on directly to change more easily whilst in the game world. These features result in a reduced time to compile code and allows game creators to tweak settings in real time.
Frostbite is a game engine developed by EA Digital Illusions. The Engine is currently designed for use on current and next gen consoles and has been adapted for a range of game genres. The engine was first used to create first-person shooters but it has since expanded to include various other genres such as racing and real-time strategy games.
The first generation of engine was used for DICE's in-house games Battlefield: Bad Company, Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The engine launched with the release of Battlefield: Bad Company and subsequent titles employed an updated version referred to as Frostbite 1.5
Frostbite 1.0 - First debuted in 2008 with Bad Company. It features HDR Audio, which adjusts different types of sounds volume and lets players hear important sounds clearly even if other noises are being simultaneously generated (for example a gunshot being louder than the in-game music due to the volume of the music being lowered whilst gunshot noises are being generated). It also featured Destruction 1.0, which allowed for certain objects, like walls, to be destroyed in real time.
Frostbite 1.5 - Debuted with Battlefield 1943 in 2009, Frostbite 1.5 improved the in-game destruction capabilities with Destruction 2.0, allowing players to destroy entire buildings instead of just walls.
Frostbite 2 - Debuted in Battlefield 3 in 2011, Frostbite 2 took advantage of the DirectX 11 API and 64-bit processors yet didn't support DirectX 9 and therefore Windows XP. The Destruction feature was upgraded to 3.0, creating more refined physics than it's predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geomerics' Enlighten technology.
DICE gave several presentations on advances in their rendering technology, primarily focusing on animation,
destruction, scale, rendering and audio.
-SIGGRAPH 2010:
- "Tile-based deferred shading acceleration" via DirectCompute. This is being ported to the PlayStation 3'sSPUs.
- Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA), again implemented with DirectCompute, for bandwidth conservation.
- Quasi-realtime radiosity using Enlighten from Geomerics.
- Improved environmental destruction.
- Realtime approximated subsurface scattering.
- Separable bokeh depth of field
- Tile-based deferred shading on Xbox 360
- Temporally stable screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO)
- DICE's lead graphics guru, Johan Andersson, presents an in-depth examination of Battlefield 3's game engine and visuals.
- Streaming data from disc to memory: "We can have 512 megs every hundred metres if we wanted to."
Torque 2D - Torque 2D is a powerful, flexible and fast open source engine specifically dedicated to 2D game development on OS X, Windows and iOS devices. Torquescript is a fast and easy to use C++ like scripting language that ties all of the various elements of a project together. It supports a large complement of functions including math, object manipulation, fileIO, and more.
Features of Torquescript include:
-Object-oriented programming
-Transparent interconnection with external C++ objects
-Built-in fast 2D math (vectors, matrices, and quaternions with all corresponding functions)
-Well-documented standard library (hundreds of functions out-of-the box)
Most game functions can be programmed in Torquescript, and engine additions such as physics or intense AI coded in C++ are called from script.
This engine also uses a physics system along side it, which is done through Box2D. This allows you to simulate rigid bodies inside the 2D environments.
In terms of sound Torque uses the OpenAL sound library that features:
- SFX/Music driver
- 2D sound support for panning, volume, Doppler, cones
- Multi-channel prioritized manager
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