Introduction to Game Engines & Middleware

Game Engines are the foundation in which games are built, the contain all the logic to be able to show graphics, play audio, compute input etc without having any of the game specific assets such as sprites or music files.

Middleware on the other hand has one specific goal in mind, for example an audio middleware just plays sounds and you would not be able to display graphics with it.

So you can think of game engines as the combination of middleware.

Who develops game engines?

There are two types of game engines based on who developed them or rather who has access to them:

  • In-house game engines - only available to one game development studio
  • Retail game engine - engines that are normally sold as a product and used by multiple game development studios

How much did game engines cost?

This really depends on the engine, it could have been anywhere between a licensing fee per game sold or a one time fee of thousands of dollars for console games.

This was due to the limited audience of game engines at the time, you would have to pay an entire development team to work on a game engine (not cheap) and you would only be able to sell to about a dozen companies.

However with the Indie game revolution a number of free or cheap game engines became available but tended still to charge much more for console development.


Commercial Game Engines

Instinct Studio

Instinct Studio was a rather obscure a software suite by the Ireland based company Instinct Technology. It claimed to combine a complete set of game development tools with an array of ‘best in class’ middleware plug-ins, giving game developers the power and flexibility to create state-of-the-art productions within realistic budgets.

Instinct Studio Screenshots

As far as we know it wasn’t used in any commercial games but it a custom version of the engine was created specifically for the University of Abertay in Scotland. Also they had a playable demo of a game called Dreadnought on their website in 2007.

The website was “http://www.instinct-tech.com/”, it was created in 2006 and lasted until 2009.

The website had a screenshot of what the editor interface was like, it is very mid-2000s Microsoft: Instinct Studio Interface

It was also featured in EDGE magazine issue 169 in their CodeShop Section: Code Shop EDGE 169


Unity

Unless you have been living under a rock you will have heard about Unity3D, it was originally released the 8th of June 2005 as a MacOSX only engine. However over its lifetime it has grown to support not just PC but also many games consoles (Wii, XBox 360, PS3) and mobile platforms (iOS, Android). It was developed by the Danish vendor OTEE

Key milestones include:

  • Unity 1.0 first version that even included a full version of the physics engine Ageia physX (8th June 2005)
  • Unity 1.1 introduced Windows deployment support on August 23rd 2005, but there was no support for editing on Windows yet.
  • Unity 1.5 introduced the cross platform web-player via the The Unity Web Player browser plugin (June 16th 2006)
  • Unity 2.0 introduced new features like the Terrain Rendering Engine, DirectX 9 Renderer for Windows, Built-in Networked Multiplayer Support, Web Player Streaming and Improved Web Player Compression. Along with a new companion product, the Unity Asset Server!
  • Unity 2.5 introduced Windows support for the Unity development environment so games can be created on both Windows and MacOSX
  • Unity iPhone was introduced on October 22, 2008

The first ever unity developer conference Unite was held in the two days between October 10-12th 2007.


Game Engines by Platform

Although game engines can be used across multiple games consoles or platforms, we have separated the game engines by platform to make it easier to compare the features between engines of a given console generation.

Platform Name Game Engine List
Microsoft Xbox Original Xbox Game Engines
Nintendo Wii U Wii U eShop Game Engines
Unity Game Engine Games on Wii U eShop
Wii U Nintendo Web Framework

Commercial Middleware

Ageia PhysX SDK

Originally known as NovodeX (by swiss company of the same name) the technology was bought by Ageia in 2004 and rebranded to PhysX. Later in Nvidia bought Ageiaand continued to support the SDK even releasing it as open source in December 2018. Although the source code was tehcnically available for free before that as long as you reginered on the Nvidia website (2015-2017).

PhysX under Ageia allowed the SDK binaries to be offered royalty free but access to the source code is $50,000 per application.

Unity announced that they would be including the full version of Ageia PhysX on March 4th 2005 which was before version 1.0 was released, which means many Unity games are using the SDK.

Menus Master was a middleware specifically for creating game Menu interfaces it was first released April 15th 2005 1. It has an interface to create the menus along with a C++ SDK that is compatible with the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC.

It was used by Delphine Software in the Moto Racer series to great success!

FMOD Sound Middleware

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Nintendo Switch Game Engines

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UDK Ultimate

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WiiU eShop Game Engines

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Wii U Nintendo Web Framework

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Unity Game Engine Games on wiiU eShop

Read all about Unity Game Engine Games on wiiU eShop in this s...

Original Xbox Game Engines

Read all about Original Xbox Game Engines in this s...

References