3D Game Engines - Post Hardware Acceleration
GoldSrc
Also known as Goldsource, this is the engine behind Half-Life and Counter-Strike by Valve Software and the predecessor of their famous Source engine. GoldSrc was based on the Quake engine but retains only a small percentage of the original code, notable additions by Valve include skeletal animation, coloured lightmaps, rewritten netcode and new AI. The name Goldsource was first used internally after developers forked the codebase as GoldSrc and Src, in order to start committing new changes for their next engine.
Unreal
When unveiled the Unreal engine was developed primarily for first-person shooters, fast forward to the release of Unreal Engine 4 and the tech by Epic Games has also found itself behind some of the most popular RPG and MMORPG's. The Unreal engine was popular among modders thanks to their custom scripting language, UnrealScript and offered a complete package for developers looking to license such a tool. Despite Unreal standing as the largest competitor to Quake, I haven't had as much experience with the engine in comparison to the others listed.
id Tech 4
Over the decade following the success of Quake, id Software continued to develop industry changing engines with the release of Quake II and Quake III Arena or id Tech 2 and id Tech 3 respectively. id Tech 4 was showcased in 2004 with the release of Doom 3, used more often as a tool for benchmarking graphics cards. The engine is almost a complete rewrite of id Tech 3, having switched from C to C++ and a unified per-pixel lighting and shadowing model.
Torque
The engine behind Tribes 2, later packaged into a complete tool set by former members of Dynamix now known collectively as GarageGames. Torque is a cross-platform game engine with networking, scripting, a built-in world editor and the powerful network and terrain system that the Tribes series is most famous for. Although originally a commercial engine, Torque 3D was released under the MIT license in 2012 with its full source available on GitHub.
Irrlitch
I have quite a bit of history with this particular engine from sometime around 2006, just after its initial release. I was using Game Maker at the time and had been experimenting with 3D in a then 2D only program. After an Irrlitch wrapper was released as a library to natively extend its functionality, I spent months tinkering and producing countless demos. Irrlitch by default is a cross-platform C++ 3D engine, originally developed by Nikolaus Gebhardt.
HPL
This engine may not be as well-known, but I have been following its development ever since the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent using HPL Engine 2. The original engine by Frictional Games powered their Penumbra series of games and was released as open source in 2010. It is cross-platform, written in C++ and uses OpenGL. As Friction Games are an indie company and the engine was originally written at a time when they students, I feel as though I can relate while following its development on the companies blog.
Also known as Goldsource, this is the engine behind Half-Life and Counter-Strike by Valve Software and the predecessor of their famous Source engine. GoldSrc was based on the Quake engine but retains only a small percentage of the original code, notable additions by Valve include skeletal animation, coloured lightmaps, rewritten netcode and new AI. The name Goldsource was first used internally after developers forked the codebase as GoldSrc and Src, in order to start committing new changes for their next engine.
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| Half-Life - Valve Software, 1998. |
Unreal
When unveiled the Unreal engine was developed primarily for first-person shooters, fast forward to the release of Unreal Engine 4 and the tech by Epic Games has also found itself behind some of the most popular RPG and MMORPG's. The Unreal engine was popular among modders thanks to their custom scripting language, UnrealScript and offered a complete package for developers looking to license such a tool. Despite Unreal standing as the largest competitor to Quake, I haven't had as much experience with the engine in comparison to the others listed.
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| Unreal - Epic Games, 1998. |
id Tech 4
Over the decade following the success of Quake, id Software continued to develop industry changing engines with the release of Quake II and Quake III Arena or id Tech 2 and id Tech 3 respectively. id Tech 4 was showcased in 2004 with the release of Doom 3, used more often as a tool for benchmarking graphics cards. The engine is almost a complete rewrite of id Tech 3, having switched from C to C++ and a unified per-pixel lighting and shadowing model.
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| Doom 3 - id Software, 2004. |
Torque
The engine behind Tribes 2, later packaged into a complete tool set by former members of Dynamix now known collectively as GarageGames. Torque is a cross-platform game engine with networking, scripting, a built-in world editor and the powerful network and terrain system that the Tribes series is most famous for. Although originally a commercial engine, Torque 3D was released under the MIT license in 2012 with its full source available on GitHub.
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| Torque 3D - GarageGames, 2012. |
Irrlitch
I have quite a bit of history with this particular engine from sometime around 2006, just after its initial release. I was using Game Maker at the time and had been experimenting with 3D in a then 2D only program. After an Irrlitch wrapper was released as a library to natively extend its functionality, I spent months tinkering and producing countless demos. Irrlitch by default is a cross-platform C++ 3D engine, originally developed by Nikolaus Gebhardt.
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| Irrlitch Engine - Nikolaus Gebhardt, 2003. |
HPL
This engine may not be as well-known, but I have been following its development ever since the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent using HPL Engine 2. The original engine by Frictional Games powered their Penumbra series of games and was released as open source in 2010. It is cross-platform, written in C++ and uses OpenGL. As Friction Games are an indie company and the engine was originally written at a time when they students, I feel as though I can relate while following its development on the companies blog.
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| Penumbra Tech Demo - Frictional Games, 2006. |
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