Introduction
A 3D game engine is a complex collection of code. Anyone entering into game development would have to spend at least a year developing a game engine or purchase a pricey game engine to utilize. Of course, another option would be to use an open source engine, but game developers have often shied away from these due to their lack of features and reliability. However, these days there are several open source engines (or low-cost commercial engines) that have a rich set of features and offer stability.Open source engines, however, do not necessarily have the performance of their more expensive commercial counterparts as they do not always take advantage of the latest features available on the CPU and GPU. The intent of this paper is to go over a few of the most common open source game engines and show how Intel tools and technologies can bring goodness to open source game development by getting the best possible performance out of these engines.
Game Engine Block Diagram
The block diagram below is of a typical single-player 3D engine, and displays the complexity of modern game engines. It shows the various subsystems and dependence between them. The "tools" portion of the engine (level editors, geometry and animation exporters, scripted event generators, etc.) have been left out for the sake of simplicity.
Figure 1. Block Diagram of a Modern 3D Game Engine
click here for larger image
Open Source Game Engines
There are several open source engines available on the Internet, some of which are listed below. This paper will focus on both the Object-Oriented Graphics rendering 3D* engine and the Quake* 3 game engine.
The following is a short list of some of the open source game engines that are available for use:
The following is a short list of freely available 3D engines that are not open source and may charge a minimal fee for commercial use:
- Ca3D Engine* (CA3DE)
- Power Render 3D Engine*
- Torque Game Engine*
No comments:
Post a Comment