Game Engines

PhyreEngine

PhyreEngine is a free to use, cross platform game engine from Sony Computer Entertainment. By 2011 PhyreEngine had been adopted by dozens of game studios to power almost fifty games for the PlayStation Store or on Blu-ray Discs.

PhyreEngine is distributed as an installable package that includes both full source code and PC Windows tools, provided under its own flexible use license that allows any PS3 game developer, publisher or tools & middleware company to create software based partly or fully on PhyreEngine on any platform.

The engine uses sophisticated parallel processing techniques that are optimized for the Synergistic Processor Unit (SPU) of the Cell Broadband Engine of PS3, but can be easily ported to other multi-core architectures.

PhyreEngine supports OpenGL and Direct3D, in addition to the low level PS3 LibGCM library. It also provides fully functional game templates as source code, including support for Havok Complete XS, NVIDIA PhysX and Bullet for physics.

PhyreEngine was launched during the Game Developers Conference. The engine was developed to introduce new rendering features. This engine was used to develop a few well known games, such as Dark Souls, Demon's Souls, Disgaea 4 and Journey, some of these games being highly rated with special consideration to the engine used to develop them, especially in Dark Souls. PhyreEngine was a finalist in the European Develop Industry Excellence Awards in 2008 for Technical Innovation, and 2009 for Best Game Engine.

The PhyreEngine has a new and powerful asset pipeline, combining enhanced versions of the already robust exporters, with a powerful processing tool to generate optimized assets for each platform. Also new is the rewritten level editor, which permits a far more data-driven approach to authoring games using PhyreEngine. Combined with a more accessible API and far more game-oriented functionality including support for entities, scripting, and integrated physics and navigation components, PhyreEngine 3.0 empowers developers to produce high quality titles with less time and lower costs.

A list of Games that have used the PhyreEngine:

Colin McRae: Dirt                                                       Shatter

Race Driver: Grid                                                        Flow

Burn Zombie Burn!                                                     Flower

Demon’s Souls                                                           Journey

Dark Souls

Disgaea 4

Under Seige

GripShift

Blender

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and compositing. It also features a built-in game engine.

lender was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio Neo Geo and Not a Number Technologies (NaN). It was primarily authored by Ton Roosendaal, who had previously written a ray tracer called Traces for Amiga in 1989. The name Blender was inspired by a song by Yello, from the album Baby.

Roosendaal founded NaN in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was initially distributed as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002.

The creditors agreed to release Blender under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a one-time payment. On July 18, 2002, a Blender funding campaign was started by Roosendaal in order to collect donations and on September 7, 2002 it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released. Today, Blender is free, open-source software and is, apart from the two half-time employees and the two full-time employees of the Blender Institute, developed by the community.

The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing, so that, in addition to GNU GPL, Blender would have been available also under the Blender License, which did not require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, this option was never exercised and was suspended indefinitely in 2005. Currently, Blender is solely available under GNU GPL.

Though it is often distributed without extensive example scenes found in some other programs, the software contains features that are characteristic of high-end 3D software. Some of these are; support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modelling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, multi-res digital sculpting (including maps baking, remeshing, resymetrize, decimation..) , outline font, and a new n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.Internal render engine with scanline ray tracing, indirect lighting, and ambient occlusion that can export in a wide variety of formats.A new pathtracer render engine called Cycles (can use GPU Computing).Integration with a number of external render engines through plugins.Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformations, shape keys (morphing), non-linear animation, constraints, and vertex weighting. Simulation tools for Soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid dynamics, smoke simulation, Bullet rigid body dynamics, ocean generator with waves.

Blender was used in many titles, such as:

Sonic The Hedgehog                        

Quantum

Grid

Tank Wars

CryEngine

CryEngine is a game engine designed by Crytek. CryEngine 3 Free SDK, originally called Sandbox Editor, is the current version of the level editor used to create levels for the CryEngine line of game engines by Crytek. Tools are also provided within the software to facilitate scripting, animation, and object creation. It has been included with various Crytek games (including, but not limited to, Crysis and Far Cry), and is used extensively for modding purposes. The editing style is that of the sandbox concept, with the emphasis on large terrains and a free style of mission programming. The editor can also construct indoor settings.

Opposed to editors like UnrealEd which use a subtractive editing style that takes away areas from a filled world space, the Sandbox has an additive style (like Quake II). Objects are added to an overall empty space.

The Sandbox's concentration on potentially huge (in theory, hundreds of square kilometers) terrain, means that it uses an algorithmic form of painting textures and objects onto the landscape. This uses various parameters to define the distribution of textures or types of vegetation. This is intended to save time and make the editing of such large terrains feasible while maintaining the overall real world sandbox free roaming style. This is different from some editing styles that often use fake backdrops to give the illusion of large terrains.

In a fashion somewhat comparable to the 3D Renderer Blender, which can be used for game design, the Sandbox editor has the ability, with a single key press, for the editor to jump straight into the current design (WYSIWYP, What You See Is What You Play Feature). This is facilitated without loading the game as the game engine is already running within the editor. The "player" view is shown within the 3D portion of the Editor.

The Editor also supports all the CryEngine features such as vehicles and physics, scripting, advanced lighting (including real time, moving shadows), Polybump technology, shaders, 3D audio, character Inverse kinematics and animation blending, dynamic music, Real Time Soft Particle System and Integrated FX Editor, Deferred Lighting, Normal Maps & Parallax Occlusion Maps, and Advanced Modular AI System

The CryEngine was also used in many large titles, such as:

Crysis

Crysis 2

Far Cry

Blue Mars

Lego Lord of the Rings Level Design

Level Design

This is the complete level. The player shall traverse through the puzzles, platforms and battles from left to right.

All yellow areas are triggers and all red areas are reactions, necessary destructibles and enemies.

This is the starting room, which is immediately met with an NPC Boss fight with NPC enemies. In order to defeat the boss the player will need to get on top of the ledges and lure it to attack the destructible pedestals that are marked out with a red circle. The yellow area's are where the player will need to use different characters' abilities to overcome the puzzle and mount the ledges.

The starting area is followed by a narrow hallway with more NPC enemies, along with a room where the player will need to combine 3 different triggers to get past the door.

Once past the door the player will need to use one of the character's abilities yet again to get to the destructible object and cause the reaction and extend the bridge...

Where the player will yet again have to use the same character's ability.

Once past the bridge the player will come to a room filled with NPC enemies and will have to destroy all the area's marked on the walls to stop them from spawning, once that is done, the final door will open and the player will be able to complete the level.