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- Do Game Development Degree
Programs Give As Good As They Get?
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2
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- May 6,
2010
- By Eric M. Scharf
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While Epic's Unreal Engine 3 (UE3), Id's idTech 5, and Crytek's
Cryengine continue to be the cream of the crop among modern day commercial game engines, Unity and HeroEngine have quickly staked claims to some
substantial game development real estate (in the mobile and MMO
spaces, respectively) - generating a solid
following with their collective ease of use, depth of tools, and
reasonable pricing models.
UE3 has maintained the greatest
saturation level among AAA development houses and game development
degree programs. Saturation, however, should not be misinterpreted
as the best or only choice among school curriculums that actually utilize
several of these competing technologies within their projects.
All but
two of these popular game engine technologies come with a powerful suite of
sub-tools, specialized for artists, designers, programmers, audio
technicians, and even QA personnel.
While it is becoming less and less
common these days, if you are developing your own proprietary game
engine and tools suite, then, these commercial offerings will have
no bearing on your game development approach, other than to provide
a basis for comparison.
Emergent's
Gamebryo is unique among this group in that it is an enhanced
middleware that can behave like a game engine . . . as long as a
game developer is willing to fill in a "few" blanks.
Gamebryo is a collection of powerful code components
and tools that – when meshed together within your own
established code base – are capable of becoming
every bit as robust as what you would receive from the other
complete game engines. Other than a noticeable cost difference, your lead
programmer really has to be confident that creating your own custom
code base is absolutely necessary before you pursue Gamebryo for
developing your games. Otherwise, time is money, and a complete game
engine will pay for itself if used wisely.
Criterion Software's Render Ware
helped establish the enhanced middleware market for products like
Gamebryo and Garage Games' Torque,
but upon being absorbed by Electronic Arts, so many loyal users
backed away from licensing the technology. EA took Render Ware
"underground," but it is still utilized within a number of its own
studios.
While Gamebryo, Render Ware, and
other enhanced middlewares help build your games up, Havok is a
robust physics-based middleware designed to help tear your games
down, encouraging impressive destructibility in a variety of high
and low detail 3D environments.
Second Life and Multiverse are generally exclusive to the development and
operation of online virtual worlds, typically used by any number of
small businesses and large corporations to sell or attract attention
to their virtual wares.
Blender deserves a special mention as a
very robust all-in-one, open-source game development solution (3D
animation, modeling, rendering, rigging, and game engine), that
like almost any other robust software application has a learning
curve due to its unique user interface. Tutorials and support for
Blender – outside of trolling associated forums – have been below
average at best, but then, not all open source applications, to
be fair, are destined to receive the organizational care and
attention of a Firefox.
"Game Maker" – by YoYo Games –
also deserves
a special mention as the most user friendly-yet-multifaceted
game engine ever offered free to the public. It has the simplicity
of some popular web site design applications. It offers a flexible
and robust feature set that liberates "the common user" and
encourages early teen game enthusiasts to engage their creative
technological curiosities.
Just when would-be game developers
thought they could come up with a robust concept and hit the "make
game" button, they learn of the additional tools – for middleware,
source control, and bug tracking – necessary to help establish and
maintain the infrastructure of their creations.
I can still recall some of the earliest
days of old school batch files being strung together to generate an
automated build process for a game project. Each batch file
contained a list of targeted assets to be virtually grabbed from
various directories on various computer systems. If one syllable or
number was misspelled or out of position, the entire build process
would come crashing down, followed by a very public witch hunt for
the lazy (or overworked) culprit.
The robust automated build processes of
today offer the ability to make playable builds for entire projects,
specific components, individual development disciplines, and even
function successfully while isolating dreaded "broken" assets.
It takes only a few weeks in a game
development environment to realize exactly how deep
interdisciplinary dependencies run on a project. Every asset has a
matching asset somewhere else along the chain of immense teamwork
involved in game development. While there is always a danger in
relying too heavily on automated tools, some are absolutely
necessary toward maintaining your sanity in the face of assigning,
tracking, updating, and completing hundreds, thousands, and millions
of unique assets.
Confluence's JIRA and WIKI products have
been well-received in the games industry as reasonably-priced and
capable bug / task tracking and information sharing solutions. While
Bugzilla certainly has its following, Subversion has also been a big
hit as a free and relatively feature-filled source control among game developers.
Alienbrain has always been the premiere
art-centric source control but a costly one, boasting great
flexibility through a relatively friendly user interface. Perforce –
alternatively – is a popular code-centric source control with its
own premium cost, though more and more studios are utilizing it
across the board for all disciplines. Perforce does offer a no-cost
license for open source developers, but therein lies the rub:
game developers want to keep their often-times proprietary source
code to themselves.
Mogware is best described as an equally
robust, simpler to use, and cheaper to purchase Alienbrain. Mogware
has even lower cost pricing models on the horizon.
Scaleform has quickly caught on in the
past six months as one of the best, most feature complete, and easy
to manipulate user interface design applications on the market.
It is relatively simple to integrate into a custom code base,
allowing crack teams of UI artists, designers, and programmers to
quickly generate quality proofs of concept and functional results.
Speedtree seems like it has "been around
forever," assisting artists and designers alike with the rapid
population of 3D environments with lush vegetation. Cost is far less
of an issue than what level of visual quality you are willing to
accept from an automated process. Forests of original, exhaustively
hand-built 3D trees would be wonderful but only on that rare project
with boundless resources . . . and time still counts as a resource.
Bink Video has been around
forever, and it continues to be the default, fire-and-forget choice
for video compression among most game developers.
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