Game Engines

[Clavin12]

Let's talk about them. Which are the best? Which are free? Is there much experience here outside of battlezone?

[Red Devil]

easy: Frostbite 2

[Ded10c]

My two absolute favourite engines are Source and Unreal. Both have proved themselves to be extremely versatile in recent years, and both have lasted a long time as far as modern engines go and kept themselves up to scratch as well. The Unreal engine certainly seems to be pushing boundaries, and I think about a quarter of the games I own run on it in some way.

Close third would be the idTech series.

[Baconboy]

Unreal is cool

[Relinies]

Source. Hands down.
It pwns all

[Baconboy]

Like Chuck Norris!

[Red Spot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fi ... er_engines


Depending on where you want to go there are several good engines around, for "FPS"games I'd say source.

[AcneVulgaris]

Been using Unity for about 3 years now. It's made it possible for me to make a living making games. It's very well designed, and supports real scripting languages. It's also cross platform... you can use the same project to build for Mac, PC, iPhone, Android, PS3, Xbox, and pretty soon, Flash.

There is a free version, and when you buy one of the higher versions, they don't want a cut of your revenue like Unreal.

One day I will make a worthy successor to Battlezone with Unity. I recommend it very highly.

[Nielk1]

I have preference to Source, but only once access to the latest, Portal 2 type engine is possible. Most modding is done on the older style Source engine, but the spiffy new things is the L4D, L4D2, Alien Swarm, Portal 2 Source variant. It has better asset management by VPK instead of by GCF too, so it is much faster loading files and such and doesn't have the overhead of referencing the Steam base program for the file checks. (This is one of the reasons why the newer Source games have DLC (free DLC mind you) while the older ones do not.)

Unreal is good IMO for certain things. I have not used it, so the best I can say is, the more players at once, the more stuff moving at once, you probably want Unreal. The more realistic but less stuff moving at once, you probably want Source. Then again the new Source variant is pretty darn good at MP, hence L4D, L4D2, AS, and P2. And L4D has a LOT of moving things at times, granted NPCs not physics entities.

For 2D, all I can think of is I have been messing with Haaf off and on. I think Haaf is the internal mechanism to the LOVE LUA based game engine. Warning, both of these are basically render code and not much else.

[Clavin12]

I have no experience in game development, but I got UDK and tried it out. It's awfully resource intensive, especially for a laptop.

[Relinies]

Like Chuck Norris!

Even source pwns this.

[Baconboy]

^Lies.

[Iron Maiden]

I'll just side with what Shogun 2 total war has, becasue I can't play it and I have a fairly powerful computer.

[Zero Angel]

Isnt source an ugly engine from the early 2000's?

[Nielk1]

Isnt source an ugly engine from the early 2000's?

The Source engine has improved by leaps and bounds from when it was first used. Also, there was the old GoldSrc used for HL1 (SHUDDER).