2d engines for android games c. Complete list of programs for creating games (2D PC)

Proprietary technology created by Guerrilla Games. Kojima Productions studio also took part in the creation of the engine. Appearing only in 2013, Decima Engine managed to become the basis for several AAA projects, as well as simply interesting games.

The first game created on the Decima Engine was Killzone Shadow Fall, which was developed by Guerilla Games itself. Initially, the studio did not report on what technology their project was being created, but with the announcement of its next game - - nevertheless said that the new project will use the previous engine - Decima Engine.

As is the case with many popular engines, the physics component of the Decima Engine is based on Havok physics. Thanks to this, Guerilla was able to create promising technology with dynamic skeletal animation and a realistic damage system.

In 2015, the Decima Engine became the basis for Until Dawn, an initially dubious horror game that eventually became the genre's biggest discovery for the entire year. Apart from Horizon Zero Dawn, the engine is also used in Hideo Kojima's ambitious project - . That is why the studio of the Japanese developer - Kojima Productions - provided assistance during the creation of the engine to the leading developer - Guerilla.

At its core, Decima Engine is designed specifically for AAA projects that require high detail and support for 4K resolution. Given the potential huge success of Death Stranding, as well as the fact that Guerilla is working closely with Sony, the Decima Engine will be in great demand in the future. We'll likely see this technology a lot in .

9th place - EGO Engine

An engine developed jointly between companies and Sony Computer Entertainment. Essentially, it is an improved version of Neon, which represented the game Colin McRae: DiRT under the “zero” number.

EGO Engine rightfully deserves a place in the top, at least for its incredibly high-quality games in the racing genre. All Codemasters games, since 2007, have been and are being released on EGO, and their track record also includes shooters, which only speaks in favor of the versatile engine.

Most of the work in creating EGO was done by Codematers, with Sony providing the PhyreEngine graphics engine. The first version of the EGO Engine released the famous DiRT and DiRT 2, as well as the Dragon Rising add-on for the shooter Operation Flashpoint. The second version of the engine was represented by DiRT 3, games in the GRID and F1 series.

On the third version, Codemasters are now making DiRT 4, which is guaranteed to be a great rally race. All of the company's projects are always perfectly optimized, despite the excellent graphics. Take, for example, DiRT 2 - the game was released back in 2009, but the quality of its images can still give odds to some modern projects (and we are not talking about indie ones).

A realistic damage system, dirt sticking to the wings of a car, car handling - all Codemasters racing games stand out for these and many other components, which the company was able to achieve only through the creation of a high-quality EGO Engine.

8th place- Game Maker: Studio

The most famous game engine and designer created in Delphi. Game Maker was developed by Yo Yo Games, and the lead developer of the technology is Marc Overmars.

Today there are seven versions of the engine, five of which exclusively support 2D games. With the sixth version, the developers decided to integrate limited 3D support.

Game Maker has gained fame only due to its simplicity. Initially, Overmars, being a professor at the University of Utrecht, created the base for Game Maker in the form of a teaching aid for his students. Subsequently, the technology appeared on the Internet, where it gained popularity.

A distinctive feature of Game Maker is that you do not need to know programming languages ​​to work with it.

During the creation of a game on this engine, the user needs to define game objects (the game is built on them), then set their appearance using sprites, and the behavior and interaction of objects is carried out by describing their reactions to so-called events (SOP).

Game Maker appeared in 1999 and continues to receive updates almost every year. The last one was released in 2011 - this is the eighth version of the engine, which received a lot of updates and additions. From that moment on, the engine began working in Unicode, its 3D support increased significantly, the room editor was improved, etc.

In 2012, YoYo Games decided to seriously rework its technology, first of all adding cross-platform support. The engine received a new name Game Maker: Studio, and only after that it began to be perceived as a professional tool for creating video games, and not as a training program.

The advantages of Game Maker Studios lie in the support of many different platforms from Windows and Mac OS, to iOS, Android, Xbox and PlayStation. In addition, the engine library and many extensions have been translated into several languages, not just English, as is usually the case. The engine has its own programming language - Game Maker Language. It also has Steam integration and is completely free (standard version only).

The only drawback is 3D, which appeared in Game Maker back in 2011, but working with it has still not been brought to an acceptable state.

The most famous games on Game Maker: Studios are the two parts of Hotline Miami. In addition to them, dozens of different games were developed on the engine, most of which were lost even in the indie segment.

However, the technology has great potential, it is actively developing and, given the popularity of the indie genre, will soon become much more in demand.

7th place - 4A Engine

An engine from Ukraine, created by the studio of the same name . The fate of the 4A Engine is intertwined with the X-Ray Engine, which, firstly, was developed in the same way in Ukraine, secondly, it was created for a game in the post-apocalypse genre, and thirdly, it was written by the same programmers - Oles Shishkovtsov and Alexander Maksimchuk.

4A Engine is proprietary software, which means 4A Games can use it exclusively for its own needs without the ability to sell licenses. At the moment, the company has released two games on this engine - Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light.

The history of 4A Engine has several dark spots. So, according to some information, the engine is a modified copy of X-Ray. This suspicion is based on the fact that the engine programmers Shishkovtsov and Maksimchuk, having voluntarily left (or being fired), used the X-Ray base they created for 4A Engine. This rumor subsequently grew into a scandal, but no real evidence was ever found.

Shishkovtsov and his comrades did not dare to continue to develop Stalker and X-Ray because the latter, in their opinion, had a poor network model and poor optimization, due to which the distribution of computer resources and memory was terribly rude. In general, according to the developers, X-Ray was not capable of supporting the new generation consoles and had no future, which is why they decided to leave the studio and start developing their own.

The 4A Engine they created only confirmed the previously expressed judgments. So, in comparison with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Metro 2033 had much better graphics (which can be attributed to the time frame), but at the same time it required significantly less resources from the computer and did not cause any errors in the system.

In Metro 2033, first of all, volumetric fog was perfectly implemented, as well as blurring of objects and their high LOD detail. And the inclusion of PhysX technology in the 4A Engine allowed the developers to add destructible environments, dynamic water surfaces and clothing to the game.

In general, 4A Engine can be called the ideological successor of X-Ray, which showed much better results and avoided numerous mistakes of its predecessor. One way or another, both engines deserve places in our top.

6th place - IW Engine

Almost every gamer has encountered the Infinity Ward engine, even if he is not even aware of its existence. IW was developed by the company of the same name from the USA, which created it specifically for its games, namely the series of the most popular shooters Call of Duty.

The history of the Infinity Ward engine dates back to 2002, when future IW employees worked in the studio . At that time, they released their debut project Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, which was based on the id Software engine - id Tech 3. About a year later, most of the team left 2015 Inc to found the well-known Infinity Ward and begin creating the cult game - Call of Duty.

Call of Duty was based in the same way on the id Tech 3 engine, which the developers informed the public about. However, the purchased engine has undergone significant modifications, which included the usual graphics improvements, the introduction of a blurred environment function, functions for processing the water surface using shaders, dynamic shadows and much more.

With such transformations, id Tech 3 version of IW moved significantly away from the original, so it was time for the company to call it its own engine and change its name.

Soon, the developers did just that when they released Call of Duty 2, announcing that the sequel would be released on the id Tech 3 modification - IW Engine 2.0. The engine of the first version, as you might guess, was appropriated by the developers for Call of Duty 1.

In 2007, Infinity Ward released the third version of the engine, the release of which was marked by Modern Warfare. Animation of faces, water textures, lighting, as well as the introduction of a new effect - depth of field - everything said that we had one of the highest quality engines for shooters of its time.

Until 2012, the company continued to use this engine, improving only the graphics component. IW 4.0 and 5.0 arrive alongside Modern Warfare 2 and 3, respectively. Despite the creation of new versions, the same Black Ops 2 was released only on the third model of the engine.

However, in 2013, movement towards full development began again when IW finished work on COD: Ghosts. And although the part about “Ghosts” received mixed reviews and was poorly received by players, many did not even notice that the company, together with Ghosts, released the IW 6.0 version. The last is the seventh, on which it was developed at the end of 2016.

5th place - RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine)

In fifth place is the engine from Rockstar. Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, or RAGE, is the product of two of its subsidiaries - and San Diego, which were developed exclusively for the company's games.

RAGE debuted in practice only in 2006, when Rockstar released a table tennis game. It's funny that the game wasn't anything unique - the developers simply decided to test the new engine on some low-budget project. Since that time, all subsequent games of the company began to be released on RAGE.

What happened before 2006? In the first half of the 2000s, Rockstar had already released several parts of GTA and managed to become famous, but then its flagship engine was RenderWare, which was developed by a completely third-party studio - . In 2004, the latter was absorbed by EA, which naturally affected the license for the engine acquired by Rockstar.

Electronic Arts has always been strict about direct competitors, which is why Rockstar management decided to abandon RenderWare, which had served them faithfully, and start creating their own engine. In just a year, the company managed to develop RAGE, since its basis was created not from scratch, but on the basis of AGE - the engine of Angel Studios.

The very first major project of Rockstar Advanced Game Engine was GTA IV. Even before its release, the company announced that the RAGE engine would use euphoria technology, a procedural animation tool that allows you to simulate realistic body physics (still used today). Subsequently released Max Payne 3, GTA V, as well as the planned - all these games were created and are being developed on RAGE.

Under the hood of the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine are all the components of the most functional engine: graphics, physics, sound and animation engines, as well as full-fledged AI, support for network modes, scripting language and much more. All components were created exclusively by Rockstar Games affiliates.

As you know, many of the company's games are focused on open world and free gameplay. That is why the key advantage of RAGE is the ability to quickly process large game worlds - this is what the programmers focused on in the first place.

As the gamer moves through the level, the engine does not stop inputting and outputting the required objects. This consistency was ensured thanks to the engine's high-quality memory manager, which is capable of eliminating and moving objects from RAM without requiring periodic fragmentation.

There is no doubt about the quality of RAGE, since it was on it that GTA V was developed - one of the best-selling and most popular games in the entire history of the industry.

4th place - CryEngine

Almost making it into the top three of our top, a series of engines from the company - CryEngine - firmly entrenched in fourth position. The graphics component of this engine is almost unparalleled, and Crysis - the first game that was made on CryEngine 2 - is considered by many to be one of the most high-tech projects in the gaming industry in general.

The original CryEngine was released in 2002 specifically for the shooter Far Cry. Then the engine turned out to be number one in terms of technological advancement and photorealism. CryEngine 2, launched in 2007, first showed its worth in Crysis.

Today there are both third and fourth versions of this engine, where one received much worse reviews compared to CryEngine 2, and the other has gone so far from the original that it is only partly part of the “family”.

A distinctive policy of Crytek, which developed CryEngine, is constant interaction with smaller studios that require a game engine. The company has issued and continues to issue licenses to any team for a small fee, which only benefits CryEngine’s reputation.

But it’s not just because of its availability that CryEngine became popular and entered the list of the best engines in the gaming industry. The available characteristics, their quality, as well as the ease of working with the engine have made it one of the most popular among indie studios.

Parallax mapping, Terrain 2.5D, subsurface scattering, dynamic lighting, Polybump 2 tool, parametric skeletal animation - CryEngine incorporated a lot of advanced technologies for its time, which still remain relevant today.

The engine has a built-in Sandbox2 level editor, which allows you to create levels in real time, work with objects and edit animation. Of course, CryEngine is worthy of the loudest praise - an excellent example of how engines should be made.

3rd place- id Tech

id Tech - such cult shooters as Wolfenstein, Quake and DOOM were created on the basis of this engine. These three giants, born of id Software, thundered in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and in our time, when the revival of old games and films took on spontaneous proportions, they returned and gave the “local” shooters a real dressing down.

As of 2017, id Tech has six versions. The first one came out back in 1992 (when many young readers were not born or had just begun to walk under the table) under the leadership of the legendary figure - John Carmack.

Actually, he received the right to be called “legendary” precisely for the creation of id Tech and the games we noted above, which were released on this engine. Then the developers called the versions of their engine after the names of the games for which these “bases” were developed.

So, the first three parts of Doom were released on id Tech 1, and on the second version, which was named Quake Engine, as you might guess, several parts in the Quake series appeared.

With id Tech 3, id Software began distributing its brainchild. The engine increasingly began to appear among projects of third-party developers (Medal of Honor, Star Trek, James Bond 007).

In addition, the engine number three was acquired by Infinity Ward, which created its own engine based on it (we talked about this at the beginning of the list, since this engine also ended up on it).

id Tech 4 is an era of significant transformation, as the engine was first written in C++. The developers rewrote all the subsystems of the engine and presented it in the DOOM 3 game. Self-shading, per-pixel lighting, etc. - the fourth version had the most modern technologies.

The company practically did not work with id Tech 5, releasing only one game for it - RAGE. It was met with controversy by the audience, although the engine itself was liked by other developers. So, on this version they released , Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Evil Within.

Finally, the sixth and latest version to date was released in 2016. The developers created it specifically for the new generation consoles, demonstrating the full power of the engine with an equally powerful project - .

First of all, the engine is distinguished by the innovative Sparse Voxel OCtree technology, thanks to which the geometry of the levels is reproduced not through a polygonal structure, but through a voxel one.

With the help of SVO, the developers managed to improve the detail of the game world through scaling: objects closest to the player are rendered in maximum quality, while objects farther away are rendered using large voxels, which have a worse quality. Otherwise, id Tech 6 is equipped with the latest technology and, being “young”, is waiting for its finest hour.

2nd place - Frostbite and Unity Engine

Honorary silver in the list of “Top 10 Engines in the Gaming Industry” is occupied by two engines that equally deserve the second position. The first, Frostbite Engine, showed itself in all its glory in Battlefield 3 and continues to show off incredibly cinematic effects, and with the second, Unity Engine, we are more familiar with its prevalence and accessibility (similar to CryEngine), although many excellent games were released on it .

Frostbite Engine was developed by the Swedish company DICE in 2008 for the game Battlefield: Bad Company. The engine replaced the Refractor Engine, an old technology with which DICE had worked throughout its previous history. Now there are three full-fledged versions of the Frostbite Engine (including 1.5), and in general the engine has managed to prove itself in racing, shooters, role-playing games, and even sports.

The DICE engine is a standard combination of graphics, sound and other technologies characteristic of a regular engine. Today it supports version 11 of DirectX, and is also optimized for working with multi-core processors.

The key advantages of the engine are destructibility and graphics. The first component is more of a branch from the second than a full-fledged aspect, however, it is the extremely realistic destructibility that they speak of when they mention the Frostbite Engine.

The graphics engine supports many post-effects, bump mapping, dynamic lighting and other modern technologies. There are practically no restrictions on the drawing distance - on top-end computers, users are able to view the entire location right up to the horizon.

And although DICE managed to prove itself and become popular even before Battlefield 3, it was the latter that allowed it to be called a real developer of the first league, where the best AAA projects are developed.

Only thanks to the Frostbite Engine, developers were able to make 32 vs 32 player battles available on huge maps with various equipment, as well as destructible objects.

Apart from many shooters, the Frostbite Engine performed well in the racing game NFS: The Run, as well as in the RPG Dragon Age: Inquisition. Today the third version of the engine is relevant, on which several interesting projects like FIFA 17 and .

And now we will talk about the second engine, which has supplanted Frostbite Engine and is placed on the same pedestal with it - Unity Engine. The engine was developed by Unity Technologies in 2005 - then not yet a particularly well-known studio, which today has a staff of thousands of employees.

Unity Engine was not created for any specific game, which is typical for our previous participants - the studio developed it solely for distribution.

Unity Technologies still owns the engine, constantly modernizing and improving it. Due to the fact that the price of the engine is set at a fairly low level, Unity Engine has become one of the most (if not the most) famous engine, used by both gaming industry giants and indie developers.

Unity Engine itself is both a game engine, an integrated development environment, and a designer for creating games. It supports mobile operating systems, Windows, Linux and OS X, and works on all consoles, both new and previous generations.

If you think that you have never encountered the Unity Engine, then you are most likely mistaken, since it is often used , Blizzard, EA and many other companies. Latest games from Obsidian, series , Kerbal Space Program and hundreds of other projects were all released on the Unity Engine.

A key factor influencing the popularity of the Unity Engine is the gratuitous nature of the package, which covers the most minimal build of the engine.

Any novice developer can download Unity Engine completely free of charge and start creating games on it, especially since its tools are incredibly easy to learn when compared to other popular engines.

Advanced and equipped with the latest technology, Unity Engine is first and foremost the most popular engine, for which it has earned the second position on our list.

1st place - Source and Unreal Engine

The winner's position repeated the fate of the previous line, so we will again talk about two engines at once, which are equally worthy of being called the best engine in the gaming industry. A person who has touched a computer at least once has probably heard about Half-Life - the most famous shooter, which at one time raised the bar following the example of Quake or DOOM.

It was the game about the adventures of the famous scientist Gordon Freeman that was made on the Source engine. The second one - Unreal Engine 3 - is closely associated with a series of shooters , which, similar to the above-mentioned action games, “pushed the bar” in the same way and became one of the best representatives of its genre.

The Source engine was developed by Valve Corporation back in 2004. And although we mentioned the first part of Half-Life above, this engine was already created for the sequel, but the first game on the engine was Counter-Strike: Source.

The first mention of the engine appeared in 1998, when work on Half-Life was already coming to an end. The developers had to discard a lot of developments and features that were originally supposed to appear in the action due to the imperfections of GoldSrc, the company’s first engine. That is why Valve employees decided to create an engine that would allow all their dreams and desires to come true.

There is no need to talk about the perfection of Source, given the popularity of Half-Life 2. The game had many great solutions and features, but the main aspect was and is still the physics engine - Havok, which Valve improved and adapted for Source.

It is thanks to these Ragdoll-like physics in Half-Life 2 that the developers managed to create the most interesting puzzles and gameplay in general. Additionally, the game's facial animation was similarly cutting-edge for 2004.

Another feature that distinguishes Source is artificial intelligence, which perfectly controls the gamer's enemies and friends. The graphics, apart from the animation mentioned above, stood out due to their shader effects.

As with Unity, anyone can work with Source for free by downloading a special utility (Source SDK) from Steam. Today there is a second version of Source, which was announced in 2015.

The game Dota 2 has already been released on Source 2, as well as several other indie projects from Valve. The publicly available version of the engine is still under development.

Unreal Engine is the engine that Epic Games is responsible for creating. Many gamers are familiar with the projects of this company, which are some of the best shooters in the gaming industry. All Epic Games games were developed on the Unreal Engine, but even if you haven’t played any of this company’s projects, you’ve probably come across this engine, since more than a hundred different games have been created on it.

Unreal Series, , Postal, Tom Clancy's, BioShock, , , , Borderlands, Dishonored, XCOM, , Life is Strange, Mortal Kombat X and dozens of other equally famous, as well as completely indie projects, were made on Unreal Engine. Not bad, isn't it?

Powered by C++, Unreal Engine is capable of running on virtually every PC operating system, as well as a variety of both high-end and less common consoles. At the moment, there are four full versions of the engine, which were released in 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2014, respectively.

However, there are also branches that are additions and upgrades to the “main” versions. Unreal Engine 4 is the youngest engine in the series, and the first game released on it was lucky enough to be the 2014 horror game Daylight.

During its existence, the engine was distributed on a paid basis, like competitors' technologies. However, the examples of Unity and CryEngine prompted Epic Games to make Unreal Engine 4 free-to-play. There is one caveat - an application or game created on the engine should not earn more than three thousand dollars per quarter.

Video: Unreal Engine features in 2017

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