BUILD | ESSENTIAL ENGINES GUIDE Power Up
As externally created engines become increasingly popular amongst developers and a necessity to indies, Craig Chapple looks at where the sector is today, and brings you an essential guide
OVER THE last ten years, the third-party games engine sector has flourished as specialist creators have emerged and studios have sought to cut costs and save time from the efforts involved in creating an internal solution. The space has become ever more democratised, with a plethora of engines offering tools created for particular genres, platforms and studio sizes, whilst others try to offer middleware kitted out for quick and easy exports to multiple devices. Development speed and ease have begun to take central importance, as well as the need to combine quality visuals with cost effectiveness. As Mike Walsh, CEO of AI plug-in specialist xaitment says: “Given today’s segmented games development market, I think you’ll continue to see two divergent game engine trends: some game engines will expand to address a larger set of needs, while others will focus on the needs of a specific genre.” David Helgason, CEO of one of the leading
engine tech firms Unity Technologies, reflects on the last ten years as “the decade of the game engine”, with studios increasingly licensing outside platforms, and says that the industry is moving to an “age of the unified solution”. “The network effects of having a
standardised baseline tool for the industry to use in training, prototyping, and production, are immense,” he explains. Senior technical director Richard Hackett of Blitz adds that the current period is one of rapid change for the sector; with cross- platform compatibility, engines are beginning to take on the service model, rather than just simply licensing out the tool. “We are increasingly looking at the
platform as a service – technology becoming more service oriented,” explains Hackett.
UNITY
CREATOR: UNITY TECHNOLOGIES PLATFORMS: PS3, XBOX 360, IOS, ANDROID, BROWSER SEEN IN: SHADOWGUN, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ONLINE, UBERSTRIKE
WWW.UNITY3D.COM
The Unity engine has proved popular among developers, having been installed over 750,000 times, with thousands of released titles created through the platform. The Unity Technologies built engine can be used to develop titles on numerous
platforms, such as console, iOS and Android. It offers a feature list that includes full terrain generation, Nvidia’s PhysX physics Engine, C# scripting as well as an extensible shader system that supports rich lighting and full screen-post processing effects. “By far one of the best features that we provide to developers is the ability to author a title once and
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then deploy it to any number of platforms,” says Unity CEO David Helgason. “While there are certainly tweaks and optimisations that need to happen to work on different platforms, we make the process as easy as possible and provide the technology to deploy to as many platforms as needed.” The base product is available to users free of
charge for commercial use, and can be used to create and publish games on the PC, Mac and Unity Web Player. Helgason says this was done so that aspiring developers could get into games creation, without having to worry about high costs. “When we introduced the free version of Unity, it was with the hope that it would give first time developers a real chance to make games and get
them published without having to worry about percentage cuts, NDAs and wasteful negotiations,” he explains. Customers can also purchase Unity Pro, which opens up several features such as audio filters, static batching, occlusion culling and deferred rendering.
“This enables games to engage more
directly with the player to provide vital information on player behaviour and foster long term player relationships through services and post-release updates.”
INDIE RISING The soar in independent development has meant that engine creators have had to change their own business models and the technology involved to create an affordable solution to an incredibly large userbase, some of whom may be only amateur developers. Matt Daly, social media director at
BigWorld, says this emergence has had a significant effect on the company’s direction, and that other vendors need to tap into the sector if they are to remain competitive. “Any middleware developer would be
remiss to not address the new needs of the rapidly-growing sector of small, often distributed, independent development teams,” states Daly. “They’re developing compelling interactive experiences in comparably smaller budgets, with faster turnaround time, a higher rate of innovation, a lower rate of risk aversion, and they’re doing it on a myriad of platforms. So, I’d say we’re seeing an intense diversification of game types, as well as the tech that facilitates their development.” With the smartphone and tablet markets
growing at a rapid pace, and the industry readying itself for the dawn of the next generation of consoles, engine firms have their work cut out to keep up. But whilst there are many challenges afoot,
the third party engine space has never been healthier, as the plethora of solutions we profile here show.
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