Gamers, Start Your Engines! 6 Top Gaming Engines Face Off

Posted 12/22/2011 at 3:52pm | by Dan Scharff

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A brief look under the hood of the top engines driving today's PC games

If this year's crop of rocky video game launches has taught us anything, it's that coding video games is hard. Sit through the 30 minute scroll that passes itself off as a credits screen these days and you'll see just how many moving parts go into making today's games. With gigabytes of art assets to create, pages of story to write, hours of dialogue and sound to record, a tangled web of complex behaviors to script, and, oh yeah, actual levels and gameplay to design, one thing is clear: making games isn't all fun and games.

Yet despite the ever-increasing complexity, the creation process is more streamlined than ever. Why? Licensable game engines, tools, and middleware. From specular maps to dynamic shadows, high dynamic range rendering to cloth simulation, from pathfinding to AI reaction behavior, game engines take care of all the nitty-gritty graphical and scripting groundwork and provide a solid (hopefully) codebase for our beloved games. And just like you wouldn't throw a HEMI into a Smart Car, or a power-saving hybrid into a monster truck, knowing which engines excel at which tasks is crucial. So here's a quick look at a cool dozen—a V12, if you will—of the biggest engines and middleware tools in use today.

Source

The Skinny: Developed by Valve Corporation, 2004; Written in C++; Proprietary but fully licensable with downloadable SDK and mod tools

You Know it From: Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 1 & 2, Portal 1 & 2, Garry's Mod, Xenoclash, et. al.

The Lowdown: We’ll start at the Source, the Source Engine, that is. An oldie but a goodie, the Source Engine debuted in 2004 with Half-Life 2, but its roots go back even farther. In fact, like many 3D engines, its origin goes all the way back to the Quake 1 engine, also known as Id Tech 1. From Id Tech 1 sprung a plethora of engines, including Valve's heavily modified GoldSrc (or GoldSource) engine, which powered the original Half-Life. The engine has since been extensively updated, revamped, and rewritten, but Source is still technically built on its GoldSrc roots, and, ostensibly, on 1996 Quake-era technology.

Though the Gold has been dropped from the name, the Source Engine has still been gold for Valve (That's Gold, Valve! Gold!!): Since its initial release it has become the sole development engine for Valve, and has been featured in all Valve releases. Now clearly showing its age, constant SDK and library updates have kept Source surprisingly relevant, and even their latest games, such as Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, and the upcoming DOTA 2 continue to run on Source.

Strengths: Source's main strength is its extreme scalability. With a full array of lighting, shading, and animation tools, and fairly good multi-processor support, it delivers high-fidelity graphics and surprisingly detailed particle and radiosity effects even on low-end PCs…even the XBox 360. Source's relatively small footprint and its integration with Steam and Valve servers make it a natural for online multiplayer development as well.

Its skeletal and facial musculature systems make it easy to create lifelike characters with expressive emotions and believable lip-synching. The animation and reverse kinematic tools still provide impressively realistic behavior and character/environment interaction with less clipping than many other newer engines. These qualities make the Source engine ideal for cinematic applications like machinima.

Garry's Mod, a popular Source-based sandbox modding tool shows off the um…realism…of Source's facial animation capabilities.

While not an open source engine, multiple SDK builds, modding tools, level, animation, and camera editors are freely available for distribution and (non-profit) development. And the Valve Developers' Community represents a massive online knowledge base and resource for developers and modders.

Weaknesses: As we mentioned, Source is old itself and based on even older source code. As such, most of its shortcomings derive from its paleolithic status. There's no native support for DirectX11 features, and it only supports up to Shader Model 3.0. As with many legacy engines, Source's corridor-based shooter roots lead it to struggle with large open areas and long draw distances. The end result is somewhat flatter, starker looking games. Games with strong art direction based on clean, crisp and simple graphics (like Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2) work well in the engine, but games with more realistic characters, more organic environments, and more interactible characters and terrain are impossible with the engine's polygon, texture mesh, and lighting limitations.

Another weakness of the engine is on the development side, where its outdated toolsets are purportedly extremely difficult to work with. Also, due to the age of the engine, multiple non-compatible builds of the SDK and the tools are available, which can complicate things.

Coming Soon: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, DOTA 2

Id Tech 5

The Skinny: Developed by id Software; announced 2007, released 2011; Zenimax proprietary engine, not licensable

You Know it From: RAGE

The Lowdown: Though Source may be part of the Quake/Id Tech extended family, Id Tech 5 is the direct descendant in id Software's line of 3D engines. Ironically enough however, despite sharing a name and much of the same development team, Id Tech 5 has far less in common with its mid-90s ancestor than Source. The brainchild of graphics pipeline mad scientist John Carmack, Id Tech 5 uses a number of novel ideas such as the MegaTexture and Virtual Texturing.

It’s hard to judge an engine based solely on one game, but RAGE was a strong showing for the rookie engine. Despite Id Tech 5 being in its infancy as far as released products are concerned, the ever-forward thinking Carmack and team already have their sights set on Id Tech 6, which is purported to use innovative texel and voxel techniques, including implementation of Sparse Voxel Octree.

Strengths: The primary talking point in Id Tech 5 is its use of the MegaTexture, first developed as an add-on technology for the previous Id Tech 4 engine. The idea is simple, instead of having smaller individual textures, the MegaTexture is one giant texture space used for terrain. Using one large texture space and pulling only the appropriate texture data for a given area allows Id Tech 5 to use VRAM far more efficiently, and doesn't waste cache and processing in repeating textures. The technology also supports ridiculously high-res texture maps of 128,000x128,000 pixels whereas the "HD" textures in most other engines top out at 4096x4096.

Unapologetically developed with console performance in mind, RAGE and Id Tech 5 perform amazingly even on dated console hardware. The engine focuses on smoothness of gameplay and high framerate, and its default performance options prioritize maintaining as close to 60fps at all times as is possible. Long draw distances and strong performance even in large open areas and during intense onscreen action make RAGE look wonderful in motion, and it's probably the best-looking console game on the market at the moment.

Weaknesses: The MegaTexture giveth and the MegaTexture taketh away. Despite being the engine's most touted strength, the one glaring weakness with Id Tech 5 is texture pop-in. MAJOR texture pop-in. Though patches and driver updates since launch have removed many of RAGE's most damning performance issues, PCs with slower hard drives and less VRAM still display some truly unacceptable texture load-in issues when changing direction quickly in the game's open areas.

The engine's focus on smooth framerate is yet another double-edged sword. In order to maintain high framerates, visual sharpness and clarity can take occasional hits, not all that noticeable on consoles, but extremely noticeable on the PC. Also, despite the gaudy texture sizes supported by the engine, RAGE was plagued by inconsistent texture quality, detail, and resolution.

Id Tech 5 looks great in motion, but a keen eye will notice blurry low-res textures along the outer edge of the screen.

Id Tech 5's other main weakness is its proprietary status. While John Carmack has expressed a desire for Id Tech 5 to become not just licensable, but open source (all other previous id software engines now are), parent company Zenimax has stated that Id Tech 5 will remain a proprietary engine. We may hope for a Fallout 4 using Id Tech 5 (Zenimax is also the parent company of Fallout developer Bethesda), but id and Zenimax have remained mostly silent about the future availability of the engine.

Coming Soon: Doom 4