[PLUS] Game engines in focus: There’s more than Unreal Engine 5

The core of all games

When announcing a new game, the focus is often on the engine used. Some companies, such as EA or Activision, mainly use self-developed engines, while many other studios rely on ready-made software from appropriate providers. There are many reasons for and against the various solutions, and the respective decision can have a major impact on the development and the end product. In some cases, it can even lead to development failure. While players usually only notice something indirectly about the engine itself, it can have noticeable consequences for the finished product and thus also for us gamers.

In principle, a “game engine” could only be a graphics backend that renders an image from the specified positions and parameters of 3D models and takes over the communication with the driver and the graphics card for this. This rendering engine offered by the game engine is noticed by the player through the optics and also through the graphics settings, because most games directly adopt the options offered by the program, for example anti-aliasing methods and advanced features such as FSR or DLSS. Broad support for the graphics features provided by the engine is therefore also desirable for developers, since the graphics can be adapted more flexibly.

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The following topics can be found in the article:

• building blocks of an engine
• Not just games
• Engine disaster at Starbreeze
• Game development overview
• Mass-produced or custom-made?
• Waiting for Godot

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