[b]Gentlemen/women ...start your "game" engines.[/b]

You
know recently I've noticed alot of comments and posts about the magical
gubbins that makes the games run, the humble and often misunderstood
game engine. So pull up a chair and be prepared to ohhh and ahh as I
explain why your CoD game has stuff in it made almost 15 yrs ago, and
more importantly why that doesn't matter one iota.

A little bit of history first...
So
back in the early days of "gaming" 1996 to be exact, probably the
single most important leap forward/development happened, ID software
released Quake on an unsuspecting world and it changed the world of
gaming forever. Before Quake us early adopters to the constant nerdgasm
that was multiplayer gaming, were restricted to stuff like playing Doom
over a lan, or highly (at the time) exspensive options involving permium
dial up services probably the most well known of these being dwango in
the states (dail up wide area network game operation). Playing actually
over the internet was something that just didnt really happen, past
strange text based multi user dungeons (MUDS) on bulletin boards filled
with the geekiest of geeks from the D&D world.

Then
Quake appeared bringing with it this entirely new strange concept
called the client/server architecture, suddenly we had the ability to
turn our pcs into servers and run games, alot of people hated it.
Ironically if you look back at some of the comments comming out of the
industry at the time directed at ID software you see comments like "it
will never catch on", "people wont want to connect to strangers". But
these 20 odd people at ID who most people thought were actually crazy
had just laid the groundwork for every single online game that came
afterwards. Theres a lot of confusion about the actual origins of the id
tech engine, depending what history you read it was either planned, an
accident so im not going to concentrate on that aspect if you're
interested in actually finding out more just search on the interwebz for
quake, or id software history.i will add a little list at the end of
stuff that can be attributed back to quake.

So
how does a game and an engine (id tech) first conceived 15 years ago
matter today?, well for starters somewhere deep in the heart of the
engine thats running and powering mw3 and previous cod games is bits of
code first written all those many years back. Where i think alot of
people misunderstand game engines is here, its hard to understand how
something written 15 yrs ago on antique computers can be as good as
something written nowadays.

First
off the basics of the internet havent really changed that much, we
still think and use the same parameters online as we did when having a
56k dail up was considered fast, The client/server system developed for
quake still works as well now as it did then. Its actually a testamount
to the original ID team that they really nailed it on the first go and
more importantly the licensed the technology out to the world and said
here you go guys" theres the tools make something awesome"

What
a game engine basically is, is a load of components that when given the
right data turn into what we see on our screens, the engine itself has
components that include stuff like - graphics (rendering), in game
physics, lighting, networking, memory allocation. These components are
all reusable and can be built apon and changed as new technologies
emerge or in the case of say graphics new cards with new features
appear. It is alot more economical for a dev team to develop games this
way than to basically build an engine from scratch, and one of the
reasons why there is actually so few game engines out their, and an even
smaller number that dont at some point in their history trace back to
the humble quake engine. Nowadays with so many platforms for games it is
also alot easier for devs to use middleware solutions as it saves
months of unnessacary work when you have an engine that can be altered
to various platforms.

It
really bugs me when I see comments especially on these forums that say
something along the lines of "this game is run on stuff 15 yrs old it
sucks" or this game uses a modified 15yr year old engine... So what?...
the car you drive to work (or in some cases the car your mom drives you
to school in) has an engine that contains parts concieved nearly a
hundred years ago, the difference is how those bits have been altered
and tweaked to produce the car engines we see nowadays. the same is true
for game engines. Both the major CoD devs have taken what was the id
tech 3 engine now renamed the iw4 engine and modified it for their
particular games mechanics, both have added stuff that pertained to the
franchises trademark aspects. The fact at its very core is some 15 yr
old components and code is by the by.Although i will add technically now
the engine in cod is not the licensed propriotity engine that previous
games were run off as its been modified so much it no longer counts as a
id tech

its what they do with it that counts. So next time you want to slate
the game for its "antiquated engine" just stop and think about it, you
wouldnt say "im not driving this years model of x car as its made with
stuff invented in the early 1900's would you?"




The
list of stuff that we take for granted nowadays with online gaming can
all can be traced back to Quakes and its engines front door.

• Online play and the know-how to connect people with different latencies and connections together
  
• Client/server model
  
• Actual 3d graphics
  
• The term camper yes folks they invented online play and the first thing that happened was some little dweeb got a sniper rifle and camped.
  
• The modding scene (the good modding scene not the bad send me 12000 ms and ill make you 10th prestige scene)
  
• Clans as quake introduced the the concept of team play.
  
• Slightly
  more indirectly born out of a need for, rather than a design feature,
  services that allowed you to find servers and connect to people,
  Originally to connect to a quake server you needed to manually enter an
  ip address usually found posted on some bulletin board. This changed
  when a few guys came up with a system that you may know better nowadays
  as gamespy.
  
• The main control method for pc gaming of using the keyboard/mouse combo..yep that was Quake.
  
• Every major fps that came afterwards owes its origins to the humble little engine that powered Quake.
  
• Due
  to the modding scene that sprung up as a result of Quake, suddenly Devs
  were finding that groups of bedroom coders were producing innovative
  and exciting new "mods" and the true what I consider golden age of the
  fps started. Games like Counter strike, Team fortress appeared during
  this period. Nowadays alot of the dev teams who work on games especially
  CoD have staff who came not from a few years of some college course in
  game design but through getting known in the modding community, be it
  in map design, total recodes or the tons of additional stuff that made
  gaming fun.
  
• and most importantly the building blocks to create what nowadays are multi million selling fps games.
  

http://community.callofduty.com/thread/1849?start=0&tstart=0#engine