Week Seventeen - The Void

Okay I’m slightly concerned, this task is about game engines, and as said in the brief we don’t do any programming, and as far as I’m concerned I’m don’t plan to, so when you ask me some question with some new and odd words my mind just does not accept them, so if I am to find out about this it could potentially end up very bad. However I do believe the more knowledge we have the more we will understand on how to make good Game Art.

Now I have some knowledge on game engines, such as I know they are there, and in the lab we have to unreal engine, and I know of other engines but know there is vast amount, and when making a game the right engine needs to be pick at the start. I have the euphoria engine on my pc and this engine seems to be incredible, the things it can create, they way the program just tells the “person” to stand straight, then if a force is introduced it tries it’s best to stay upright, and as far as I found and read it’s boarding on human like, I smell Skynet.

As I said there were some new words in this blog task, so I went out and found what they meant, it’s all about the void, so here’s a snippet of what the words meant if your interested, more so I can refresh my own mind in future without filtering through Google.

Additive Environments

In an additive environment, the beginning consists of emptiness - usually called the void. The void is endless and empty. When the designer creates something, for example a room, he creates a space within the void by sealing it off - the easiest way to do this is to simply create a hollow cube. Something like a vast landscape with a beautiful sky is created by first designing the terrain, buildings, trees et cetera, and then surrounding it all with a "skybox", a large hollow box, the insides of which show the sky. This box is necessary to keep the void out, since the world and the void must always be kept separate. A hole in the world is called a "leak", since the void is "leaking" in.

Some popular 3D engines using additive environments:
The Quake engines (Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena)
The MaxFX engine (Max Payne)
The Half-Life engine (Half-Life)
LithTech (Aliens vs. Predator)

Subtractive environments

As is probably obvious, a subtractive environment is the opposite of an additive environment. In a subtractive environment, there is no void. Before there is a world, there is only an infinite solid. To create a world, designers must subtract bits from this infinite solid, creating hollow spaces for the user (player) to exist in. This eliminates the possibility of leaks, but many designers still favour the additive environment because it is easier to manipulate. In fact, a known way of working around the subtractive style editing is by first subtracting a huge cube, creating a void (of sorts) in the middle of the infinite solid - and then working additively in the middle of this (fake) void, expanding it as necessary.

Obviously game engines are reused for a number of different games, and mostly it’s the basic engines that are user friendly and can also be adapted. When the engine is adapted it called middleware, a separate program often made by the games developer when making a new games, that can make an engine do what they want it to do, and also will separate that game from a different game running the same engine.

Right as may seem fairly obvious I have little knowledge of this subject, and I’ve tried to look into it but my minds just getting fragmented pieces of knowledge, so I think this is something I’m going to have to take time to understand, especially for next year as we will be implementing our models into the unreal engine, and from what I’ve heard this just fun, fun…fun….