Game Engines, The Backbone

Well as you can tell by the title, this week’s entry is about game engines. I personally have no knowledge about these, what so ever, therefore don’t expect anything amazing to follow.

A game engine is a software system designed for the creation and development of video games. The core fundamentality’s provided by a game engine usually include; a rendering engine for both 2D and 3D engines, and physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence (A.I) and several others.

The process of games development is frequently economized by, in large part, reusing the same game engine to create different games.

Another thing I am going to look at in this entry is meant by subtractive and additive. Well within all things these have a very similar meaning.

Subtractive, as you all know for you basic maths skills, this meaning to take away, or remove certain elements. Within game engines, this means removes certain aspects of the whole thing to optimise performance.

Additive, once gain something you first start to understand from maths, the meaning is to add certain elements, most of the time to an existing element. Within game engines this could mean adding certain components to make the game engine perform the required actions, of improve overall performance.

Introduction to the Games Industry

Because the aim of this task is to write about the current state of the games Industry i have focused on what conserns be most, and that is the loss of jobs due to this global recession

In light of the current credit crisis, the games industry is doing exceptionally well, the industry is doing exceptionally well, the industry has continued to grow in leaps and bounds, and also hit a new sales record in 2008 with a raise in both video game hardware and software by 19% over 2007. Its fair to say though that it’s not as high as many had predicted.

A telling strain in any industry is the presence of major job cuts; the game industry is no exception. In late December Sony reported that it would be cutting more than 8000 jobs, and that they will be decreasing its investments into its electronic research by 30% by March 2010.

In October Electronic Arts (E.A.) announced that it will be cutting 6% of its work force. But after failing to meet sales and predicted targets for the year, they said they there will be deeper cuts and cancelation of several projects.

With these announcements many companies have been changing there tune about just how strong there games are.

Song Computer Entertainment Europe head David Reaves, told Eurogamer.net that the industry is not recession-proof, but is essentially doing well.

"It's a function of the economic situation that you are going to find people who are resilient, who do not play with their pricing, who are very efficient; the videogames industry is inherently very healthy."