While playing games, you probably wondered how your character Super Mario always responds the way you want, and you lost yourself in the most beautiful and robust RPG graphics around you.
Of course, they are nothing more than some vital AI programs, but what made these AI programs so solid and noteworthy is where you can build your world within it?
To get a clear idea about your gaming characters first you need to solve how are game engines made. Let’s deep dive to explore the programs and structures behind it that create a world as accurate as the world around us.
What is a Game Engine
When we talk about game engines, we talk about a very different world and reality. It’s not a single software or hardware; instead, it consists of a varying branches of software to build the “Gaming Framework.”
Moreover, It’s an integrated software development environment known as “Gaming Architecture,” which consists of settings and tools to optimize and simplify the video game with various programming languages in the way you want to play.
There are plenty of gaming engines you will see around you, including unreal or unity. These engines play a crucial role in bringing your character and environment back to life.
Creating character models and ensure them behave in a specific way quickly is made possible due to the engine pre-installed with methods like rendering 2D or 3D graphics; physics that simulate real-world scenarios. It also includes lighting, and artificial intelligence, which automatically responds to players’ actions, and sounds.
In contrast to reinventing the wheel every time they want to make a game, such game engines allow development teams to concentrate on actually creating their games. Another important reason new developers choose free game engines such as Unity or the Unreal Engine is that they are easier to learn and use than commercial alternatives.
At earlier times, game developers developed their video games by their specifically rendering engine, which only worked for that game. It didn’t work for other games, so they always had to make an engine from scratch. There are no such troubles nowadays once you get Unreal Engine or Unity.
How are game engines made?
To understand how game engines are made, we need to know the five primary components that make a game engine and how they work hand-to-hand with perfect coordination. In this article, I will talk about these five components and discuss their part in a game, which will explain how game engines are made.
1. Math Engine
Math Engine is the foundational basis of every game and even works in the PacMan games where mathematics decides how the enemy ghosts will move. It controls every little detail, rule, and mechanic of your character.
To set the rules of your game, you have to understand the mathematics that puts all the rules. No math means no rules. Mario is floating into space, and bullets are shot in random directions in first-person shooting games; these are all you have to see without the math.
From starting, you have to learn to handle matrices and vectors. Vector additions allow a character to move, where the dot and cross products will enable the influence and creation of a third vector. While matrix helps you to rotate your entity, you can use Quaternion, which takes lesser spaces to do the same task.
Then you have to use geometry, axis coordination, and motions to keep the movements and sizes of your characters and objects very precise.
2. Rendering Engine
After creating a computer model, rendering is the final step in creating an image or animation. Rendering is an essential process for your game, solely responsible for building your world. So you have to connect with your Graphics Processing Unit when you are rendering a 2D or 3D object.
OpenGL works as the medium to send your graphics data from CPU to GPU. OpenGL helps render three data types, including 3D objects, 2D objects, and cube maps.
3D objects render your 3D characters, 2D objects render your fonts and sprite, and cube maps render your skymaps.
Every game object contains rendering information such as Vertex Position, UV Coordinates, normal data, and Textures used to create the object’s appearance. It is the vertex position that the GPU uses to assemble the object’s geometry. Lighting operations are carried out with the help of the standard data.
There are two types of rendering. The first one is ‘Real-Time’ rendering. It is a continuous rendering process that displays 20 to 120 frames per second. It renders visually noticeable graphics by the eye in a fraction of a second. The engine renders with you wherever you go in the game, and anything beyond your sight would still be in the wireframe state.
The other one is ‘Non-Real-Time’ rendering. It is important to note that this method does not render everything in your visual site; instead, it renders specific things to conserve processing power and provide you with a higher-quality image. This method is primarily used for cutscenes and cinematics.
3. The Physics Engine
It is an exciting feature of the game engine. The physics engine determines an entity’s position and velocity. This is accomplished by integrating the external forces acting on the entity.
The physics engine integrates the equations so that the activities match physics laws, most notably, gravity and fluid objects’ behavior. We can determine the velocity and position of an entity by integrating the force of gravity. The Physics Engine uses this information to create the illusion that the entity is in free fall. The most common algorithm to integrate the motion is Euler’s equation.
4. Artificial Intelligence
To give you a more interactive experience in the game, AI takes control of the other objects and Non-Player Characters in your game. Such as the response of enemy combatants or the enemy shooting you, or the opponent you face in football games, and AI controls all of these.
In most cases, AI in games is implemented using pre-written scripts created by AI-trained software engineers. Instead of writing rigid codes, we can easily simulate how our character reacts when he hits a wall or sees an animal by creating a tree of behavior nodes.
5. Sound or audio engine
Adding sounds is more accessible than the other tasks. Sound engineers often add sound effects or create ambient effects for their video games by APIs, including Open-AL, SDL audio, X-Audio 2, or Web Audio.
Conclusion
These aren’t everything, just the primary steps towards making Game Engines. Now you know all the game engine components to understand how are game engines made. With the knowledge of programming codes and skills in 3D graphics, even you can sit right now to make your own game.
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