What Is A Game?

 What Is A Game?

By Popescu Nicolae 

Almost all of us have a very good idea of ​​what a game is. The common term "game" includes board games such as chess and Monopoly, card games such as poker and blackjack, casino games such as roulette and slot machines, war games, computer games, various types of games between children. , and the list goes on. In the lessons, we sometimes talk about game theory, where many manufacturers choose strategies and strategies to maximize their benefits within the framework of a well-defined set of game rules. When used in contextual contexts or computer-based entertainment, the word "game" usually includes images of a virtual-dimensional world that includes a humanoid, animal, or car as the main character under the control of the player. (Or in the old geezers among us, it probably reminds us of old two-dimensional images like Pong, Pac-Man, or Donkey Kong.) In his excellent book, Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster explains the game. so that it is coherent self-expression that gives the player a growing challenge of the patterns they are learning and eventually catching on. Koster's assertion that learning and artistic activities are at the heart of what we call "fun," just as humor becomes fun when we "discover" it by seeing the pattern.

Video Games Like Soft Real-Time Simulations

Most two-dimensional video games are examples of what computer scientists can call real-time soft computer simulations. Let's separate the phrase to better understand what it means. In most video games, the subset of the real world - or the imaginary world - is mathematically modeled for computer use. Modeling is a measure of simplicity and simplicity of truth (even if it is a hypothetical fact), because it is not possible to clearly include all the details up to the level of atoms or quarks. Therefore, the mathematical model is to simulate a real or imaginable game world. Balance and simplicity are two of the most powerful game developer tools. Used properly, even the simplest model can sometimes be quite sophisticated and extremely fun.

Proxy-based simulation is one in which a number of different businesses known as "agents" participate. This fits well with the definition of many three-dimensional computer games, where the agents are cars, characters, fireballs, powerful dots, and more. In view of the multiplayer environment-based environment, it should come as no surprise that many games today are based on, or at least, object-based programming language.

All interactive video games are temporary simulations, which means that the visual game world model is dynamic — the game world situation changes over time as the game events and story unfolds. The video game should also respond to unexpected input from its human players — that is, the interim simulations that interact. Lastly, most video games present their stories and respond to input players in real-time, making them a real-time interactive simulation.

Notable exceptions are in the category of interactive games such as computer chess or real-time strategy games. But even these types of games usually give the user some sort of visual image of a real-time user.

What is a Game Engine?

The term "game engine" came in the mid-1990s to refer to first-person shooting games (FPS) similar to Doom by id Software famous for its insanity. Doom is built on a well-defined division between core software components (such as a three-dimensional graphics rendering system, a collision detection system or sound system) and art assets, game world, and gaming rules that incorporate gaming experience. The value of this division became apparent as developers began licensing games and re-inventing them into new products by creating new art, world buildings, weapons, characters, cars, and game rules with only minor modifications to "engine" software. This marks the birth of the "mod community" - a group of individual gamers and small independent studios that create new games by refining existing games, using the free tools provided by the original developers. In the late 1990s, other games such as the Quake III Arena and Unreal were designed with the use of reuse and "fix" in mind. Engines are highly customizable in writing languages ​​such as id's Quake C, and engine licensing began to become a viable second-class distribution for the creators they created. Today, game developers can license a game engine and reuse key components of its software components to build games. While this practice still involves large investments in custom software engineering, it can be far more economical than upgrading all the components of an in-house engine. The line between the game and its engine is often blurred.

Some engines make a clear difference, while others make almost no effort to separate the two. In one game, the rendering code may "know" exactly how to draw an orc. In another game, the rendering engine may provide normal purpose function and shading resources, and the "orc-ness" may be fully defined in the data. There is no studio that makes a clear distinction between game and engine, which is understandable considering that the meanings of these two parts often change as the design of the game intensifies.

Undoubtedly the data-driven architecture is what separates the game engine from a piece of game-based software but not the engine. If a game contains a strict code component or game rules or uses special-case code to provide certain types of game items, it becomes difficult or impossible to re-use that software to make a different game. We should probably keep the word "game engine" of software that can be expanded and can be used as the basis for many different games without major modifications.

Obviously, this is not the difference between black and white. We can imagine the reuse gamut when every engine falls into it. One would think that a game engine could be something like Apple QuickTime or a Microsoft Windows Media Player - a piece of software that is a common target that can play almost any game content you can think of. However, this good thing has not yet been achieved (and it may not be possible). Many game engines are carefully designed and tested to drive a certain game in a given hardware environment. And the most common multiplatform engines are only suitable for building certain types of games, such as first-person shooters or racing games. It is safe to say that if a game engine has a common purpose or part of middleware, it becomes too small to run a particular game somewhere.

This situation is due to the fact that designing any piece of software that always works involves making trades, and that trade is based on speculation about how the software will be used and/or about the targeted computer systems on which it will operate. For example, a rendering engine designed to handle adjacent indoor areas is likely to be less effective in providing a large outdoor space. An indoor engine may use a binary space partitioning (BSP) or portal system to ensure that no drawing geometry is enclosed by walls or objects near the camera. The external engine, on the other hand, may use an indirect, or non-existent shut-off method, but most likely use aggressive level-of-detail (LOD) techniques to ensure that remote objects are given a small number. triangles, while using triangular matches with high geometry adjustment near the camera.

The advent of faster computer hardware and specialized graphics cards, as well as more efficient rendering algorithms and data structures, is beginning to soften the differences between image engines of different types. It is now possible to use a first-person shooting engine to create a real-time strategy game, for example. However, the trade-off between normal and good performance remains. The game can always be made more interesting by adjusting the engine to specific requirements and limitations of specific games and/or hardware.

Engine Differences In All Types

Game engines are usually specific in some way. The engine designed for a two-person fighting game in a boxing ring will vary greatly from a multiplayer online game engine (MMOG) or a first-person shooting engine (FPS) or a real-time strategy engine (RTS). However, there is also a lot of variation - all 3D games, no matter what type, require some kind of low-level user input from joypad, keyboard, and/or mouse, some kind of 3D mesh rendering, some kind of heads- high display (HUD) which includes text rendering in various fonts, dynamic sound system, and the list goes on. So while Unreal Engine, for example, was designed for first-person shooter games, it has been successfully used to create games in a number of other genres as well, including simulation games, such as Farming Simulator 15 (FS 15 mods) and the famous third-party shooting franchise. Gears of War by Epic Games and hot hits Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City of Rocksteady Studios.