MFGamers

Doom To Dunia (part 3)

03/12/2009 at 11:54 (Features)

A Brief 3D Engine History by Cyberpunk

Here’s the third and final part. Please take a look at parts one and two, if you haven’t seen them yet.

CryEngine

It’s said that Crytek originally developed CryEngine as a technology demo called X-Isle to show what Nvidia’s Geforce 3 was capable of, and it was so impressive, it ended up giving birth to Far Cry, a surprise hit that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Now a multiplatform engine (CryEngine was originally a PC-only game engine, but now supports consoles as well), The engine is in constant development, and Crytek are currently on CryEngine 3.

High on visuals, CryEngine’s use of pixel shaders made for realistic water in Far Cry. Adding to the level of immersion was lush vegetation and no load times as you wandered the vast landscape.

With the help of CryEngine, Crytek would again push the hardware envelope with Crysis, a shader heavy DirectX 10 game (it also supports DirectX 9) that remains one of the most brutal gaming benchmarks available.

Date Released: 2004
Notable Games: Far Cry, Crysis, Crysis Warhead

RAGE

RAGE, or Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, was a joint collaboration between RAGE Technology Group and Rockstar and replaced RenderWare as Rockstar’s game engine of choice. RAGE combines a rendering framework, physics engine, audio engine, network libraries, animation engine, scripting language, and more into a tidy package. Some of those features come from other sources, such the Euphoria engine (animation) and Bullet physics engine, parts of which have been integrated into RAGE.

One of Rockstar’s goals in developing its own engine was to make objects feel more realistic, particularly when speeding around locales in different sized vehicles or running on foot. In addition, weather plays a role in how vehicles handle in Grand Theft Auto IV, the second game to utilze RAGE (Table Tennis being the first). Rockstar also spent considerable time attempting to make explosions look more realistic, mainly through particle effects.

Date Released: 2006
Notable Games: Rockstar Presents Table Tennis, Grand Theft Auto IV, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Grand Theft Auto IV: the Lost And The Damned, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad Of Gay Tony

Infinity Ward MW

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs on a proprietary engine, built by Infinity Ward, with features that include true world-dynamic lighting, HDR lighting effects, dynamic shadows and depth of field. “Bullet Penetration” is calculated by the engine, taking into account factors such as surface type and entity thickness. The game runs in a native resolution of 600p for its console versions.

Certain objects, such as cars and some buildings, are destructible. This makes distinguishing cover from concealment important, as the protection provided by objects such as wooden fences and thin walls do not completely protect players from harm. Bullet speed and stopping power are decreased after penetrating an object, and the decrease is dependent on the thickness and surface type of the object. The game makes use of a dynamic physics engine, not implemented in previous Call of Duty titles. Code was included to determine spawning points based on the nearby weapons, and enemy positions and line of sight. The various criteria are meant to minimize players dying immediately after rejoining a match, or being “spawn-killed” due to players simply waiting for players to “respawn”.

The game engine has also been used for the development of two other Activision games. An enhanced version of the original engine was used in Call of Duty: World at War, the fifth installment in the Call of Duty series after Call of Duty 4, while a slightly altered version has been used for the James Bond video game Quantum of Solace.

Date Released: 2007
Notable Games: Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warware, Call Of Duty: World At War, James Bond: Quantum Of Solace, Modern Warfare 2

Unreal 3

The most recent of the Unreal engines, Unreal 3 is a complete development framework for DirectX 10-capable PCs, as well as both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game consoles. According to its developers, “every aspect of the Unreal Engine has been designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind.”

Like Rockstar’s RAGE, Unreal 3 includes some ‘middleware’ technologies, resulting in a smorgasbord of functionality. The robust feature-set includes a multi-threaded rendering system (Gemini), a 64-bit color HDR rendering pipeline, various physics effects powered by Nvidia’s PhysX, particle effects (Cascade), in-game cinematics (Matinee), a complex skeletal animation system supporting up to 4 bone influences per vertex along with full mesh and bone LOD support, and a ton of other programming goodies.

Unreal 3 has been the basis of numerous games, not the least of which is Unreal Tournament 3, which is actually the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series and the eight Unreal game overall. Unreal Tournament 3 is perhaps most notable as one of the first (and few at the time) AAA games to support AGEIA’s (now Nvidia’s) PhysX. The Unreal 3 engine has gone on to become the current most popular engine for game development, and has been used on some of the most popular games of all time.

Date Released: 2007
Notable Games: America’s Army 3.0, American McGee’s Grimm, Army of Two, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, Bioshock 1 & 2, DC Universe Online, Gears of War 1 & 2, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, Mass Effect 1 & 2, Mirror’s Edge, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 1 & 2, Unreal Tournament 3

Euphoria

Developed by NaturalMotion, Euphoria is an animation engine capable of creating animation on the fly. According to its developers, Euphoria combines artificial intelligence, bio-mechanics, and physics, the end result of which is a much more natural simulation of the human (or creature) body than what’s possible with ragdoll physics.

Part of the reason for this is that Euphoria simulates not just the skeleton, but also muscles and the nervous system. Adaptive intelligence modules control how a character moves and adds to the realism moreso than what is possible through predefined animations.

Rockstar integrated parts of Euphoria into its RAGE game engine, but NaturalMotion insists Euphoria isn’t middleware.

Date Released: 2007
Notable Games: Grand Theft Auto IV, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Dunia

After a successful release of tropical shooter game “Far Cry” in 2004, Ubisoft, having bought the rights of the game from Crytek, developed the next version of the game named “Far Cry 2″. Unlike “Far Cry” this time the game was made available on XBOX 360 & PS3.

A completely new game engine was developed for the game named “Dunia”. This time there will be no concept of “Levels” in the game and everything was based on an open and dynamic environment. It had a lot of eye candy, with new real-time day and night lightening and RealTree vegetation system. Pc gamers needed a high-end multi-core CPU and a good Directx10 GPU card to enjoy the game, whilst console gamers got a slightly parred down, but still very impressive version.

Date Released: 2007
Notable Games: Far Cry 2