Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

This article to share with you is about what the engine is, Xiaobian think it is very practical, so share with you to learn, I hope you can read this article after some harvest, not much to say, follow Xiaobian to see it.

Engine is the core component of a program or system developed on an electronic platform. Using the engine, developers can quickly build, lay out, or leverage the functionality needed to run a program. In general, an engine is the supporting part of a program or system. Common program engines include game engines, search engines, antivirus engines, etc.

Extended information: Game engine

A game engine is the core component of a well-written editable computer game system or interactive real-time graphics application. These systems provide game designers with a variety of tools needed to write games, with the goal of allowing game designers to easily and quickly program games without starting from scratch.

Compare the engine of a game to the engine of a racing car. The engine is the heart of the car, determining the performance and stability of the car, the speed of the car, the joystick and other indicators directly related to the driver are based on the engine.

The same is true for games. The story, level, art, music, operation and other content experienced by players are directly controlled by the game engine. It plays the role of midfield engine, binding all the elements in the game together and directing them to work simultaneously and orderly in the background.

Simply put, the engine is "the main program that controls all game functions, from calculating collisions, relative positions of physical systems and objects, to accepting player input, and outputting sound at the correct volume." "

So engines aren't something magical. Whether it's a 2D game or a 3D game, whether it's a role-playing game, an RTS game, an adventure puzzle game, an action shooter game, or even a one-megabyte Mini games, there's a piece of code that controls it. After continuous evolution, today's game engine has developed into a complex system composed of multiple subsystems, from modeling, animation to lighting, particle effects, from physical systems, collision detection to file management, network features, as well as professional editing tools and plug-ins, covering almost all important aspects of the development process.

The first is the shadow effect, which is the way the lights in the scene affect the people and things in it. The lighting effect of the game is completely controlled by the engine, and the basic optical principles such as refraction and reflection, as well as advanced effects such as dynamic light sources and color light sources, are realized through different programming techniques of the engine.

The second is animation. The animation system used in the game can be divided into two types: one is skeleton animation system, and the other is model animation system. The former uses built-in bones to drive objects to move, which is more common, while the latter is directly deformed on the basis of models. The engine pre-embeds these two animation systems into the game to facilitate animators to design rich motion shapes for characters.

Another important function of the engine is to provide a physics system that allows objects to move according to fixed rules. For example, when a character jumps, the system's default gravity value determines how high he can jump and how fast he can fall. The trajectory of bullets and the way the vehicle bumps are also determined by the physics system.

Collision detection is a core part of physics system, it can detect the physical edge of each object in game. When two 3D objects collide, this technology prevents them from passing through each other, which ensures that when you hit a wall, you don't go through the wall or knock it down, because collision detection determines the position and interaction between you and the wall based on the characteristics of the two.

Rendering is one of the most important functions of the engine. When the 3D model is completed, the beauty union will assign material maps to the model according to different surfaces, which is equivalent to covering the skin for the bones. Finally, all effects such as model, animation, light and shadow will be calculated in real time through the rendering engine and displayed on the screen. The rendering engine is the most complex of all the components of the engine, and its power directly determines the final output quality.

An important function of the engine is to communicate between the player and the computer, processing signals from the keyboard, mouse, joystick, and other peripherals. If the game supports networking features, network code is also integrated into the engine to manage communication between clients and servers.

Through these boring introductions above, we can at least understand one point: the engine is equivalent to the framework of the game. After the framework is played, the level designer, modeler, and animator only need to fill in the content.

Therefore, in the development process of 3D games, the production of engines often takes a lot of time.

It is precisely because of cost savings, shorter cycle times and reduced risk that more and more developers tend to use third-party off-the-shelf engines to make their own games, and a huge engine licensing market has formed.

The above is what the engine is, Xiaobian believes that some knowledge points may be what we will see or use in our daily work. I hope you can learn more from this article. For more details, please follow the industry information channel.

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