The Best Game Engines?

I'm trying to make a list of the most efficient game engines and would like some input What are the best game engines whose coders deserve a medal?

The list so far:
Amazing:
Source
Warcraft III
Rogue Squadron 2 & 3 for the NGC
BlackSun (Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, shadowing on anything by anything without a performance hit!)
BlackSun2
Havok
Unreal 3

Commendable:
Guild Wars
Unreal 2
Crytek

 

Battlefield 2 engine.



JUST KIDDIN; BF2 engine must be one of the worse actually.

 

I haven't played a lot of games and I don't really care about quality/benchmarks as long as I can play it all right.

Anyway, I was always impressed with how well UT2004 ran on my P4, Radeon 9600, 512MB RAM. Yup, that's what I've been using till a NP2090 for college.

I think it's been the basis for other games (?), but I wouldn't know...

 

Gotta agree, nearly all console ports are poor as well actually most game engines are just shoddy, why can't anyone take the path of Blizzard and it's spinoffs, I wonder if Hellgate will be efficient...

 

Pretty much all the Blizzard games have a great egnine. Besides that, most aren't very good.

 

Source Engine = the greatest. I'm still amazed how well Team Fortress 2 runs (around 50 FPS) at max settings (@1920x1200, w/o AA), and it looks like a frickin' Pixar movie in real-time.

Three more:
-Doom 3 Engine - a bit dated now, but still looks amazing indoors and doesn't require much GPU power.
-Unreal Engine 2 - extremely mod-able, and runs well even on the oldest systems.
-FEAR engine (forget the exact name) - Beautiful and runs well.

 

Hmm... I'm not sure about Doom 3 since it didn't run too well on my friends 9800... I'll put FEAR up if someone googles the name

 

Company of Heroes runs great with the Havok engine.

 

I have to say I love the Source Engine. Ran okay on my 6 year old desktop with Geforce 2 MX, and now with TF2 on my new laptop it looks amazing. What came to mind while playing Halo 3 is how the character models aren't even close to those of HL2 which came out in '04.

 

What about CryENGINE and the upcoming CryENGINE 2? I don't have any game that runs on this engine, but I've seen nice screenshots...

P.S.: I really like the physics of the Havok engine.

 

Best engines are:
1.Source
2.Serious Sam 2 engine ...on every cpu you can activate antialias,hdr, and all is very smooth with every video card...it's a programming masterpiece
3.Crytek engine
4.Painkiller engine...very sad it's not so used coz it's rich of detail and very light

 

Serious Sam 2 doesn't really tax a GPU so gotta pass on that...
Crytek is on the edge but I'll add it.
CoH is pitiful under DX10 sorry but it looks great

 

Thats not the egnines fault. Its a shoddy patch, what do you expect.

 

Half-Life 1 engine, anyone can make a mod.

 

This is just silly.
The only person here who seems lazy is you. If you want to judge these games and their engines, perhaps you should do a weeee bit more research.
Exactly how you come to the conclusion that the Civ4 developers are "lazy" is beyond me, but one thing is for sure. It is not because of anything to do with the game.
At the same time while yes, Source scales pretty well, and Hl2 runs on even the slowest computer, the engine is still a horrible mess compared to Civ4. Try modding both and you'll quickly see what I mean.
And oddly enough, only Valve's own game run well with Source. Every third party game that has been attempted ran like crap compared to Valve's games (Vampire: Bloodlines, Dark Messiah) So is it really Source that's good? Or is it Valve's game (not engine) developers who know a few tricks?

And what is Warcraft 3 doing on your list? Gosh, an 8 year old game runs smoothly on today's computers! Clearly that's proof of the engine's superiority. Clearly all future games should be based on it.
And crytek? Ffs, no games using it are out yet. Isn't it a bit too early to judge it? Isn't it supposed to have very high system requirements too?

Apart from that, most of these games don't really have "engines".

 

whatever engine TES-Oblivion uses is nice...

 

Google "Oblivion" with "Poor coding"...

 

i did...and most of it bashed about the load times and whatnot..and the graphics cards..but those that can play it decently. any game will have poor coding of sort if you really scrutinize it.

 

besides..they are among one of the first companies to offer that much realism into a gigantic open sandbox game...geez, give em some credit. i've never encountered any place in oblivion that would be "poor coding" (no long load times, no major graphic issues, etc), although it probably has some like all other games.

 

You're forgetting the torque engine. Probably forgetting about it because it is mainly for indie developers. But it is probably the most efficient and easy to develop engine out there. The networking is the best of any engine, that I know for sure. Plus an indie license for the engine is cheap... $150.

http://www.garagegames.com/products/111/

 

Source Engine, even though it doesn't look as CryEngine, its functionability beats CryEngine and thus more appealing.

 

The F.E.A.R Engine is called the Lithtech: Jupiter EX Engine.

 

What about the Scimitar Engine in Assassin's Creed? it's AMAZING!

 

We don't know how well optimized it is, or how easy it is to develop for..

 

how come no one mentioned Unreal engine?

 

wtf, why hasnt a single person mentioned Unreal Engine 3? It is also quite amazing in my opinion as it can make a game like bioshock look AMAZING on an old card like mine. Efficient and powerful.

 

Best engines,

Souce, it's constantly updating, It pretty much went from DX8 all the way now to jacking parts strait out of DX10, and letting DX9 users utilize it.
They've gone from static lighting to full on HDR, and now support theorectial 32xAA. Also the engine now scales to fit any screen resolution, even ones that you make up such as 2000x500 etc etc.. Also I've made one mod by myself, and completed 3 other mods with full on teams, and trying other engines such as UnrealE2, and the DOOM3 engine, I can personally say it's the easiest I've used, but it could be a bit better optimized.

Overall, I'd choose the Crytek engine, heck, I couldnt care that I get 1FPS in max graphics, the way Far Cry 2 looks IS AMAZING..

 

Bioshock DID look great, BUT, there was ALOT of very poor quality textures in the game, many look downright muddy, But I know it's not the engine's fault.

 

how has the Quake 3 engine not got a single mention on here :s.

There are loads of games based off it. Its easy to work with and make mods for. And it's super fast. Although teh graphics don't look that good they do look ok in some of teh later games bassed off it. For instance I can get about 800FPS in wolfenstien ET which looks pretty good at 1600 x 1200 res with overclocked 8800GTX.

 

How efficient is it?

And I do not mean offence to coders as most of the time they lack the budget.

Civ4's engine is horribly inefficient when it comes to AI, if anyone disagrees I'll hear you out

 

Well, I haven't used it yet...I've seen gameplay trailers, and it looks great. Assassin's creed is coming out this november, so is COD 4 modernwarfare...can't wait to spend my $110 on these 2.($60 for Collector's edition of COD 4 and regular assassin's creed for PC).

 

Does it run awesome on low/mid end cards?

 

I can't confirm that. I was watching the videos from gameplaytrailers.com and it was beautiful( in HD).

My favorite video(s)->

Video of COD 4 single player campaign->
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And Assassin's Creed->
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Just put a fake birth of date and year if you're not old enough.

It's worth watching. Trust me.

 

any id software game i think has a good engine

 

Well, I just can't wait for these games.