Best Gaming Engine

[Tanuki]

What do you think is the best gaming engine ever and why?

Feel free to use and explain your own criteria.

I am picking the Infinity Engine for being used to make nothing but games that I enjoyed.

[The_cranky_hermit]

Engines don't make games. Developers do. If Infinity had a publicly available SDK, and was therefore accessible to the kinds of people who remake Zork using RPGMaker2000, I can guarantee that 90%+ of the games available for it would be ones you would not enjoy.

I pick Unreal Engine. It's lasted for twelve years and counting, and it's versatile enough to be used in pretty much any kind of 3D game other than large scale strategy games. Too bad it still defaults to Vert - behavior.

[Tanuki]

I edited my post to make it more Cranky friendly.

[lobski]

Best "ever" or the "current best"? If the former, I am tempted to say either the UT99 engine or the Q3 engine.

Currently, my vote goes to Source.

[Delphium]

+1 to the Source engine.
Great SDK support, native Hor+, scaleable across poor to awesome PC configurations, huge modding community for it.

[yogibbear]

Source engine
Quake engine

Hm.... unsure of which gets it. I play more Source engine games today still... but i "think" the quake engine may have been more important to gaming. Plus source engine is a derivative of the quake engine in a long waffled based discussion... so....

QUAKE engine hands down.

[DaFox]

Source engine.

I just love playing on source. I love how it feels in general.

[Slinky]

Definitely the Source Engine. Incredibly smooth and can run decent even on integrated graphics.

[Abram]

Uhhhh yep.

But yes, it comes down to a competent developer. Those are in short supply :(

[Paradigm Shifter]

Depends what sort of game you want.

[dopefish]

Unreal Engine 3.

It provides incredible visuals, amazing performance, has a great SDK and toolset, and is so widely used you know it's capable of anything. Every month a new build of UDK is released with a ton of new features, fixes, and changes. They just released December's UDK build today with full support for iOS and mobile platforms.

Source engine is just far too old, the visuals are extremely lacking, it does not implement a lot of current-generation technologies or next-generation technologies, and it's toolset just isn't up to par with today's needs. There were also very little changes in the engine over the years.

[yogibbear]

What do you think is the best gaming engine ever and why?

/10char.

[Guest]

CryENGINE® 3

[yogibbear]

CryENGINE® 3

So far, it looks pretty crap to me.

[Griffin]

I'd have to say CryEngine 2 and 3. They may not be the most popular, but the work i've seen done with them (outside of the crysis series) blows everything else out of the water graphically.

[Jupix]

Nice thread. The source engine has a nice SDK and HL2 was amazing when it came out. The CryEngine was mindblowingly far ahead as far as graphics, and it came out in the same period. Whatever they used for Red Faction was interesting because of the (somewhat) freely destroyable surroundings.

But... I guess this is mostly due to nostalgia but I'd probably choose the Build engine. That's what they used for Duke Nukem 3D among other games. It's was pretty high-tech for its day, made for a really pretty and lively game world, and supported some revolutionary & ingenious features like camera switching and working mirrors. Also, the ability for spaces to overlap was pretty interesting and made it possible to create huge maps in a small grid. It had its fair share of glitches but I loved it when I was a kid.

[yogibbear]

I'd have to say CryEngine 2 -snip-

I can agree with this ^^ (Not the "3" bit though... that is yet to be proven beyond some very very poor tech demos)

But... then we get into the "gaming" definition... and is it "good" for "gaming" or is it just impressive and doing pretty much everything you could want to do (provided you had infinite horsepower and zero bottlenecks?).... [And yes my Crysis runs at 30fps+ with a few settings not on ultra but on game or whaever it was.]