What's your favourite (commercial) engine?

[Blizzard]

Hi

I write this topic to launch a discussion to the engines that have moved the most famous games in the last two years!

If I write "What's your favourite engine?"
you all write to me IRRLICHT

so I've add the commercial word to denote the engines object of this topic.


FIRST OF THIS TOPIC! for my favourite engine
I write "Source".
The version I've selected is the newer. The version of HalfLife2: Episode one, Valve add to this version of the engine the HDR lighting and other effects.
I also denote the best work of Beteshda Softworks for the engine of TES IV:Oblivion. Very good the shaders but it has a problem with the shadows of the people's head!

I want to make a discussion such the discussion that had Quake vs DukeNukem3D in 1996 .... too funny

[boboS]

Yeah my fav. one is Source too.. Besides HDR and other special efects it works great on older gfx cards too

[jam]

The Dark engine - (Thief 1/2, System Shock 2), Produced some vary nice visuals in it's day and allowed for some very large and diverse maps.

other pick

The "Jedi" engine - ( Star Wars: Dark Forces, Outlaws), In Outlaws The Canyons where unbelievable, considering it did not use 3D hardware but used a software render.

[Blizzard]

Hei,

the discussion is extended on the software engines?

The tecnology is too old, but it's right talking about these storical engines!

I select the "Build Engine" used in DukeNukem 3D in 1996. This software engine was programmed by the 3dRealms(Apogee). The engine is used in many games such as ShadowWarrior, Blood, Rise of the Triad ecc...

I've selected this tecnology because the 3dR develop a ray casting engine that can render open spaces (such as a canyon). It can render multifloor map (Doom Engine can't render 2 floors one on another).
But the most complex feature is the capability of the BuildEngine to render inclined planes(Doom engine can render only horizontal and vertical planes).

Build engine, I think is one of the most complex raycasting engines... it was used at the same moment that Carmack develop the Quake I engine.

good bye

[jam]

The tecnology is too old, but it's right talking about these storical engines!

too old? It's only 11 years ago

Anyways to fill in the details on the "Jedi" engine it had the following features: rooms over rooms, polygonal objects, haze and fog and the ability to look up and down. It was created by Ray Gresko in 1995.

[dawasw]

My favourite is Quake 3 engine. Very common, stable, fast.

And how many games were started thanks to existence of this engine. (actually how many games were started due to Id software )

I like Source too because it uses such cool effects as you guys already said, also textures are looking great in source engine. (or they all have some shader filters ?)

The engine I really don't like is the Oblivion. Tes IV: Oblivion engine is great for terrain, plants, vegetation stuff - and quite good physics (but there are few bugs unfortunatelly) but I think that it is optimised very badly. All of my friends who played Oblivion had many technical problems with the engine including graphical bugs/crashes to desktop and such. Also the biggest disadvantage with the engine I think it's some bad memory allocation. After one hour of playing game tends to do some strange fps jumps and sometimes swaps hardcorely.

I understand that it's engine of the next generation but maybe it would be better if they optimise it a bit more than that. (and this nice HDR eats system a lot that's why my friends are playing with Bloom only)

PS I'm from Poland so maybe I have differ feelings than people from US and other countries, because a common system in Poland is : 2 ghz, 512 mb ram, 128 mb video card , while in US most people use twice better specs like those I guess.

[afecelis]

Unreal and the Quake series; specially Quake3. Q3 was considered "the perfect engine":
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/perfect/

Most of the things we see now are spawned from them (specially from ID's engines), and creating-developing with them is a pleasure

About other actual engines; I'm very impressed by project Offset:
http://www.projectoffset.com/

and I also like Stalker's X-ray engine (which IMO looks pretty much like HL's Source):
http://stalker-game.com/index_eng.html

there are a ton of other good engines out there, but I'll stick with Quake3, which also allows me to create stuff for Irrlicht!

ps. You could turn this into a poll.

[Blizzard]

A comment to project Offset:

IMPRESSIVE !!!!!


It gives me the same emotion when I seen Unreal Engine 3 for the first time



(afecelis: "ps. You could turn this into a poll. " )sorry! what does it mean??

[afecelis]

IMPRESSIVE !!!!!

Yup, project offset is da bomb. Did you check the videos?

sorry! what does it mean??

What I turned your thread into... a poll so that people can choose

[Baal Cadar]

IMPRESSIVE !!!!!

Yup, project offset is da bomb. Did you check the videos?

I did. What part of it is not possible with other recent engines?
They sure know how to generate hype.

[Akano]

My choice: Reality Engine

Why: If you had the chance to get your hands on it, you know why (http://artificialstudios.com/)

[afecelis]

Oh yes, I agree; The "reality" engine is amazing as well. Although they were bought out by Epic. So now what's real and unreal got together!

[sRc]

lol i remember looking at all sorts of engines, for like a day or two before I found Irrlicht...

a friend of mine from another message board who lives in the middle east somewhere introduced me to the idea.. I didnt even know the concept of "graphics engines" existed before that! i was trying to do everything from scratch!

[RapchikProgrammer]

I was simply amazed by the stability and speed of the quake 3 engine when it was first released! It ran pretty smoothly on ma cuz's pentium 3! With not much specifications! With those amazing graphics running on such a low end machine was a huge deal!
But then came the unreal engine which just killed me! Even on my puny radeon 7500 it ran like a rocket and medium graphics settings! So i had to rate unreal as ma favourite!