Week 17: Game Engines

Basically a game engine is an application or software that compiles multiple elements and physics to create the game. Much in the same way that you bring graphs and words into powerpoint to produce a presentation.

Many game engines are out there in the world today and it seems they are certainly getting a lot more realistic. Using the example of the Havok engine, Valve have produced games that allow characters to go flying in the right direction after being hit by rockets and becoming limp after losing life. Then again, there are many cases where the character will become a completely limp ragdoll leading to do wierd poses, and others when characters will bend over backwards into a wall when dead. At least you can shoot these ragdolls off buildings and crowbar some corpses so they jangle around. Perhaps the character deaths arent the excel of the Havok engine but it was definitely made to have suitable physics for general items laying around the area so that they could bounce around realistically. Tires and wooden boxes react as they would if they had been fired across a room with a gravity gun.

According to what I have found on the internet this subtractive and additive editing is about how you build things. Additive editing is when you start off with nothing and put things into it. Using the example of editing video, additive is when you begin with an empty timeline and then you fill it up with clips. Subtractive editing is once you have a  5 minute movie but need to cut it down to 3 minutes. At least that was my understanding  of what id read up about it.

As with most things, buying an already existing game engine it saves you the effort of having to make anything yourself and this will cut down your production times by so much as you can put things in and itll be done. However you are kinda stuck with the physics of what has been programmed into it. If this doesn't fit the game you want to make then you are kinda stuck.
Of course the advantages to making your own are the opposite. You can make things and characters move the ways you want them to but you'll need to take the time out of your project to make this engine.

As a side note, the new Euphoria engine being used on the force unleashed could well be the future. Having the character do a different motion everytime depending on whats happening. HItting a wall and showing the impact the way you really would do from any angle rather than just one wall hit animation. Characters reacting to their environment is also a large bonus and reacting to one stimuli and also reacting to another at the same time. (Stormtroopers being force-lifted and then thrown into a wall and crushed by a rock). So when The Force Unleashed comes out, I'll be able to see how great having a real life simulation is in a game compared to multiple animations.