CryEngine

CryEngine is a game engine designed by the German game developer Crytek. It has been used in all of their titles with the initial version being used in Far Cry, and continues to be updated to support new consoles and hardware for their games.

The CryEngine software development kit (SDK), originally called Sandbox Editor, is the current version of the level editor used to create levels for CryEngine by Crytek. Tools are also provided within the software to facilitate scripting, animation, and object creation. It has been included with various Crytek games (including, but not limited to, Crysis and Far Cry), and is used extensively for modding purposes. The editing style is that of the sandbox concept, with the emphasis on large terrains and a free style of mission programming. The editor can also construct indoor settings.

As opposed to editors like UnrealEd, which use a “subtractive” editing style that takes away areas from a filled world space, the Sandbox has an “additive” style (like Quake II). Objects are added to an overall empty space. The Sandbox’s concentration on potentially huge (in theory, hundreds of square kilometers) terrain, means that it uses an algorithmic form of painting textures and objects onto the landscape. This uses various parameters to define the distribution of textures or types of vegetation. This is intended to save time and make the editing of such large terrains feasible while maintaining the overall “real world” sandbox free roaming style. This is different from some editing styles that often use “fake backdrops” to give the illusion of large terrains.

In a fashion somewhat comparable to the 3D Renderer Blender, which can be used for game design, the Sandbox editor has the ability, with a single key press, for the editor to jump straight into the current design (WYSIWYP, “What You See Is What You Play” Feature). This is facilitated without loading the game as the game engine is already running within the editor. The “player” view is shown within the 3D portion of the Editor. The Editor also supports all the CryEngine features such as vehicles and physics, scripting, advanced lighting (including real time, moving shadows), Polybump technology, shaders, 3D audio, character inverse kinematics and animation blending, dynamic music, Real Time Soft Particle System and Integrated FX Editor, Deferred Lighting, Normal Maps & Parallax Occlusion Maps, and Advanced Modular AI System.

Unreal Engine

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs, and other RPGs. With its code written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today

On August 17, 2005, Mark Rein, the vice-president of Epic Games, revealed that Unreal Engine 4 had been in development since 2003.^[68] Until mid-2008, development was exclusively done by Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic Games.^[69] The engine targets the eighth generation of consoles, PCs and Tegra K1-based devices running Android announced in January 2014 at CES.

In February 2012, Mark Rein said “people are going to be shocked later this year when they see Unreal Engine 4”.Unreal Engine 4 was unveiled to limited attendees at the 2012 Game Developers Conference,^[72] and video of the engine being demonstrated by technical artist Alan “Talisman” Willard was released to the public on June 7, 2012 via GameTrailers TV.^[73][74] This demo was created on a PC with triple GeForce GTX 580 (tri SLI) and can be run on a PC with a GeForce GTX 680.^[75]

One of the major features planned for UE4 was real-time global illumination using voxel cone tracing, eliminating pre-computed lighting. However, this feature has been replaced with a similar but less computationally-expensive algorithm prior to release for all platforms including the PC because of performance concerns on next-generation consoles. UE4 also includes new developer features to reduce iteration time, and allows updating of C++ code while the engine is running. The new “Blueprint” visual scripting system (a successor to UE3’s “Kismet”) allows for rapid development of game logic without using C++, and includes live debugging. The result is reduced iteration time, and less of a divide between technical artists, designers, and programmers.

Game Maker Studio

Originally titled Animo, the program was first released in 1999,^[2] and began as a program for creating 2D animations. The name was later changed to GameMaker, lacking a space to avoid intellectual property conflicts with the 1991 software Game-Maker.^[3]GameMaker primarily runs games that use 2D graphics, allowing the use of limited 3D graphics.^[4]

GameMaker is designed to allow its users to easily develop video games without having to learn a complex programming language such as C++ or Java through its proprietary drag and drop system.^[5][6] These icons represent actions that would occur in a game, such as movement, basic drawing, and simple control structures. It is also possible to create custom “action libraries” using the Library Maker. Game Maker Language (GML) is the primary interpreted scripting language used in GameMaker, which is usually significantly slower than compiled languages such as C++ or Delphi.^[7] It is used to further enhance and control the design of a game through more conventional programming, as opposed to the drag and drop system.

GameMaker accommodates redistribution on multiple platforms.^[8] The program builds for these platforms: Windows, Windows 8, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, HTML5, Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8, Tizen, Xbox One, and Playstation.^[9][10] However, a Windows desktop computer with system requirements equal to that of the game produced is required in order to develop the games along with a broadband internet connection.^[11]

Controversy

Contruct 2

Construct is an HTML5-based 2D game editor, developed by Scirra Ltd.^[4][5] It is aimed primarily at non-programmers,^[6] allowing quick creation of games in a drag-and-drop fashion using a visual editor and a behavior-based logic system.

The primary method of programming games and applications in Construct is through ‘event sheets’, which are similar to source files used in programming languages. Each event sheet has a list of events, which contain conditional statements or triggers. Once these are met, actions or functions can be carried out.^[7] Event logic such as OR and AND, as well as sub-events (representing scope) allow for sophisticated systems to be programmed without learning a comparatively more difficult programming language.Groups can be used to enable and disable multiple events at once, and to organize events.

Unity Game Engine

With an emphasis on portability, the engine targets the following APIs: Direct3D on Windows and Xbox 360; OpenGL on Mac, Linux, and Windows; OpenGL ES on Android and iOS; and proprietary APIs on video game consoles. Unity allows specification of texture compression and resolution settings for each platform that the game engine supports,^[6] and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post-processing effects.^[10] Unity’s graphics engine’s platform diversity can provide a shader with multiple variants and a declarative fallback specification, allowing Unity to detect the best variant for the current video hardware and, if none are compatible, to fall back to an alternative shader that may sacrifice features for performance.^[11]

Unity is notable for its ability to target games to multiple platforms. Within a project, developers have control over delivery to mobile devices, web browsers, desktops, and consoles.^[6][12] Supported platforms include Android, Apple TV,^[13] BlackBerry 10, iOS, Linux, Nintendo 3DS line,^[14][15][16] macOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Unity Web Player (including Facebook^[17]), Wii, Wii U, Windows Phone 8, Windows, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. It includes an asset server and Nvidia’s PhysX physics engine. Unity Web Player is a browser plugin that is supported in Windows and OS X only,^[18] which has been deprecated in favor of WebGL.^[3] Unity is the default software development kit (SDK) for Nintendo’s Wii U video game console platform, with a free copy included by Nintendo with each Wii U developer license. Unity Technologies calls this bundling of a third-party SDK an “industry first”