Week 17! When a bird gets sucked into an engine they call it "bird strike". It's not bird strike, it's "engine suck"!

The game engine, the heavy lifter of all the tech involved in game making. The game engine is the software responsible for managing the various functions of a game. The engine has a list of functions to perform such as a physics, animation and rendering to name but a few all which come together in a glorious crescendo enabling you to shoot a bad guy in the face on your favorite games!?!

With beginnings in games such as doom and quake in the 90's the game engine was soon on many developers shopping list. Rather than starting from scratch many developers will buy in an already existing engine. This provides a number of advantages such as quicker production times and a reduction in the production costs. This does however mean that any problems may need to be referred back to the engine developer and therefore another party then becomes involved in the production of the game.

The game engines employed in today's current generation of consoles are increasingly more sophisticated and there has been a separation in the different functions often running individually. An example of this is in racing games where the physics thread will be running at a different pace to many of the other core functions. This is a small example of some of the changes that have had to be made to how the game engine operates in order to incorporate the increasing need for realism in today's games.