BUILD | ESSENTIAL ENGINES GUIDE BLITZTECH
CREATOR: BLITZ GAMES STUDIOS PLATFORMS: PC, MAC, PS3, XBOX 360, WII, 3DS, PSVITA, BROWSER, IOS, ANDROID SEEN IN: DEAD TO RIGHTS: RETRIBUTION, HOUSE OF THE DEAD: OVERKILL, WRECKED
WWW.BLITZGAMESSTUDIOS.COM
BlitzTech is a cross-platform game development tool that has been utilised by indies and large studios alike. The tech covers pipelines
from an integrated asset management database through visual editor with real-time editing to automatic dependency tracking and
deployment into the game. The engine supports ‘high quality graphics’, as
well as real-time lighting, shadows and effects, Blitz’s own physics, audio, AI, scripting and network services. Blitz technical director Richard Hackett believes that supporting a plethora of platforms and tuning the technology to fit various development team sizes is the biggest challenge facing the sector right now.
INFERNAL
CREATOR: TERMINAL REALITY PLATFORMS: PC, XBOX 360, PS3, PS VITA, 3DS, IOS, WII SEEN IN: STAR WARS: KINECT, GHOSTBUSTERS: THE VIDEO GAME
WWW.INFERNALENGINE.COM
Offering what it states is a platform ideal for triple-A development, Terminal Reality’s Infernal Engine allows users to create high performance games for a multitude of devices from console to mobile. Used in the company’s own games such as Ghostbusters: The Video Game and Kinect Star Wars, lead technical artist Ryan Monday says the tool offers a single WYSIWYG editor that “allows
users to deploy to all consoles and mobile platforms and allows them to maximise on their development budget by focusing on game-related functionality”.
GAMEBRYO
CREATOR: GAMEBASE PLATFORMS: PLATFORMS: PS3, XBOX 360, WII GAMES: EL SHADDAI, EPIC MICKEY, LEGO UNIVERSE, CATHERINE
WWW.GAMEBRYO.COM
Gamebryo is a multiplatform engine which Gamebase say has been designed to offer a simple development method. Working on a license per title basis, Gamebase technical director Gabriel Liberty says the platform can be used by medium to large studios and aspiring indie devs alike.
“The focus of Gamebryo is to facilitate game
development,” says Liberty. “To achieve this, we simplified the workflow so
that even the most novice games developers can produce high quality games. Simplicity alone is not enough and you have to have the muscle to drive current demand for amazing graphics running at amazing frame rates.”
50 |MARCH 2012 Liberty believes that the engine space has gone
through a “significant pass”, and that one of the sector’s central philosophies is speed, both in creation of the platform and in its ability to quicken the development process. He says that Gamebryo overcomes this barrier by offering incremental updates to its technology as the industry advances, keeping its users up to date with the latest tools. “Gamebryo now has the ability to resemble game studios internal technology by being able to deliver technology incrementally to customers who wish to stay on the cutting edge,” explains Liberty. “This provides our development team strategic insight on how the technology is being used by customers and what adjustments need to be made. No longer do we have a cycle where we ship technology to only find out that it is not aligned with customer needs. We can save time and
It also features the Velocity Physics engine that
allows users to create destructible environments, with a collision system its creators claim maintains thousands of simulating objects and offers real human body physics. Despite being known for its integration into medium
to large studio titles, Monday says Infernal has shifted its focus to providing affordable solutions as the sector moves away from simply pushing hardware boundaries. “For the past decade the engine space has been
focused on pushing the latest hardware to its limits,” he says. “With the recent indie boom we have shifted our focus to tools, allowing smaller studios the ability to put out triple-A quality products on a low budget.” Monday also says that when the platform was designed, Infernal wanted to make sure that it would
be future proof, with the intensive systems in the engine possessing the ability to be multi-threaded. “This gives us a huge advantage as new hardware
starts to hit the market. We will fully support the next- gen consoles, continuing to keep Infernal on the most platforms of any solution on the market,” he says.
“We are seeing much more variation in the scale of games from traditional console triple-A through to XBLA, browser and mobile,” he explains. “This brings challenges for both technology and business models to ensure that what we offer is appropriate for both sectors. He adds: “It isn’t just about bringing console
quality to multiple devices and ensuring that the performance and power management is there; it is at least equally important that the development tools we provide support both the high-end quality on one side and also rapid development cycles on the other.” Hackett says that as well as the range of platforms
and features the engine current supports, Blitz is continually looking to position itself for the future and has has just added support for Native Client, a Google Chrome technology for securely running
C++ code in the browser, as well as positioning itself to support next-generation development, which he hopes to announce later this year. “We are also looking at future platforms such as
console quality gaming for HTML5 capable browsers, and have some promising proof of concept technology for targeting HTML5 with full hardware accelerated 3D,” he says.
resources by providing our customers easy access to the latest and greatest.” Liberty adds that customers who adopt early
pieces of new tech can help define it, which he claims is a collaboration that “has never been attempted before in the game engines field”, with the company having gone through “major changes to make this possible”.
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