If you're at all like me, you wear the most sensible footwear on Earth. You
occasionally get excited about the release of a bigname game title. You
have at some point in the past heard a friend complain about a forementioned
bigname game using the same worn out old engine. Or conversely have encountered
the massive hype train that usually accompanies a shiny new engine. But
these overly enthusiastic game journalists and downer type friends
often neglect to explain what exactly a
game engine is. So here we go. Firstly,
they provide a rendering engine which allows designers to pair their
in-housemade 2D images with 3D
wireframes to create fully actualized models. Then usually one or several
application programming interfaces such as the upcoming DirectX12 and Vulcan are
used to furnish the rendering engine with efficient access to a systems
processing and graphics hardware. Secondly, game engines must provide well
everything else as well. There's the obvious stuff like physics or collision
detection engines which account for general movement and the interaction
between models like you know characters and the ground as well as stuff that you
might not have considered before like realistic lighting effects with
realistically bouncing light rays, realistic diffusion through different
materials, and even crazy stuff like the scattering of light beneath the surface
of a model's skin to give him natural looking rosy cheeks for example. And of
course something thirdly has to keep our game subjects marching perpetually along
the horizon. So AI engines are also
pivotal to give our characters the ability to create Skynet inside of our
No, just kidding. Usually an AI engine is more like a complex arrangement of
behavior trees. But anyway, the point is that a game engine is the sciency
programming skeleton that supports the game designers and lets them focus on
the flesh, you know, the story and gameplay elements of their title instead
of spending countless hours locked away in a room focused on like the sound. Oh
yeah, don't forget sound and physics of like bouncing balls. Okay, so now that
we have an idea of what game engines are for, the next obvious question is where
do they come from? Well, son, let me tell you. When a man loves a woman and
No, sorry, just just kidding. So, simply put, they come from well, a lot of
money. There are open source game engines out there, but for the most
part, no one is building game engines just to help a brother out. And there
are a couple of main reasons for a developer to build one. Number one, your
company, uh, let's say Epic, makers of Unreal Engine, or Valve, the makers of
Source Engine, decides to focus on licensing this engine technology to
smaller developers rather than trying to make every huge Blockbuster game from
scratch or even the third episode of a blockbuster game. Number two, your
company has the resources to absorb the
multi-year investment into engine building to avoid paying out a
percentage on future game sales. Blizzard would be a great example of
this. Or number three, your company just
can't find the right technology in a prepackaged engine and needs to build
their own whether they like it or not. So that's it in a nutshell. achieving
optimal cost efficiency and then in some cases anyway allocating those extra
resources to other parts of production like paying these guys to do voice
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in the how did you hear about us section, by the way. So thanks for
watching, guys. If you like this video, well, you know what to do. If you disliked it, well, you know what to do
there, too. If you have a comment with suggestions for future fastest
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multiple members of Linus Media Group eat bugs. Yes, that will happen. Was it
fun? Well, you'll have to find out.