What are game engines exactly? It is natural to ask yourself the same question every time a company comes along and boasts about their new game engine. Simply put, Game Engines are frameworks for game development. Nowadays, they are responsible for rendering graphics, memory management, collision detection, artificial intelligence and so much more.

These frameworks usually cover the necessary parts required for a game such as:

• Graphics
• Audio and
• Logic.

These aforementioned are required no matter you are creating an indie or AAA game.

On top of these most modern game engines also cover areas like:

• Physics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Networking
• Optimization etc.

But, why and how did they came into existence?

On top of these most modern game engines also cover areas like:

Back in the day almost every game was built from scratch.

Let’s say you are part of a development team and you just got the design for a new game. You will have to tell the system which graphics to show at what coordinates in the screen. In addition, you will need to destroy or delete any graphics that is currently not in use or simply not in the vicinity of the screen so as to save memory and hence providing better performance.

So, if there was a system that could keep track of all the objects and automatically destroy them it would make the process much easier. Creating this system might also take up a lot more memory but will save hours of development and that is a just trade-off.

You might also have noticed that most of the games have objects, characters and enemies. So better to create a system that can handle any game rather than create the same thing over and over again. Enter game engines. Frameworks that provides the tools and structure required for almost every game to function.

Today, the games can handle high complexities with much ease. But this was not the case not so long ago. Memory was so limited and precious. Even 512KB was a luxury.

A game engine usually contains five components.

• Game logic.
• Rendering engine - to generate 3D animated graphics.
• Audio engine – with algorithms related to sounds.
• Physics engine- to implement the physical laws and
• Artificial Intelligence.

Third-party game engines became popular since the rise for the demand of 3D games. Studios started to use them in order to speed up the development process. But still most companies prefer cooking up their own game engines.

Third-party game engines will save you a lot of time in development while in-house game engines will help you achieve better optimization. Obvious choices as third -party game engines would have been Unreal Engine and Unity 3D for a long time. Some of the prominent in-house game engines are:

• CD Projekt RED – REDengine 4
• Rockstar Games – RAGE
• Ubisoft - AnvilNext

Game engines are not just for creating games now. They have taken over various areas such as high fidelity simulations, real-time graphics rendering in movies and so much more.

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