GameEngines & 3D Models

I am a little confused as to the purpose of game engines. Lets take an FPS as an example.

From my understanding…

Each level is created by a modelling tool, e.g 3DS max. Whoose OBJ file is exported then loaded. Would each level be one model or do we position the walls and stuff using opengl?

So companies would use 3DS max to make th levels, characters e.t.c, then what does a game engine do?

optimizations, lod levels
shading, shadows : both realtime and precomputed.
animations
collisions
game logic, ai, etc

frustum culling, depth sorting, scene graphs, compatibilty to older hardware, …
an engine does all sort of different management.
wall in a level like you see them are also not duplicated but probably have one instance and rendered with different transformations to save gpu memory (management).

so the game engine is basically just a bunch of cpp/h files, which are abstracted from game specific data, to handle various solutions to common problems?

The main game loop will essentially just call things from the game engine, like:: foreach(monster) do { gameEngine.ai(params) }

I dunno why, but I thought the game engine was developed by tools developers to make the game lol

so the game engine is basically just a bunch of cpp/h files, which are abstracted from game specific data, to handle various solutions to common problems?

The main game loop will essentially just call things from the game engine, like:: foreach(monster) do { gameEngine.ai(params) }

I dunno why, but I thought the game engine was developed by tools developers to make the game lol

actually there is a slight difference between game engines and 3d engines. the later are responsible to render data in most efficient way, the first uses some ingame logic to handle entities like monsters, players and so on.

“so the game engine is basically just a bunch of cpp/h files, which are abstracted from game specific data, to handle various solutions to common problems?”
hell of alot cpp/h files!

an engine is not a tool itself, it is shipped with various tools to make game development easier. but all in all an engine implementation decides how good an engine is.

check f.e. Unreal3 engine:
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/features.php?ref=technology-overview

Wicked, thanks for that clarification, it might seem obvious to graphics veterans, but to us newbies its quite hard to find a place which explains the whole procedure clearly.

holy crap… I can’t believe how automated and developed the Unreal engine is omg… There’s no need for graphics, ai, physics programmers at all… :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: damn artists taking all the jobs

thats the point of an engine. :wink: it’s doing pretty much everything for you already, so game/3d development takes less time.

no wonder its tough work grabbing a job in this industry then…