This is new to me, Game Engines. What are they use for. I come from Lightwave and just recently start hearing Game Engines in Blender?
Seriously. Not that hard.
So, yeah, a game engine is a tool or program that ‘powers’ a game (like an engine). They usually come with all of the features necessary to make a complete game, and also usually handle large portions of low-level code (like drawing, sound processing, and physics) for you. Examples of game engines are Game Maker, Stencylworks, the Blender Game Engine, Unreal Engine, Unity, and Crytek’s engine.
I think Bullet its an Engine for itself, but its integrated into Blender Game Engine, but yes, i agree SolarLune.
One the one hand, there all all-in-one game engines, that do everything: rendering, keyboard/mouse input, physics, sound and game logic.
Some that support Python are the BGE, Panda3D and CrystalSpace.
The other approach is to combine different engines for different things, such as Ogre for rendering, Bullet or ODE for physics, CEGUI for HUDs, etc.
As SolarLune correctly mentioned a Game Engine is a middleware or framework that provides you all the functions you need for your game. This enables you as Game Developer to concentrate on the content rather than on the game basics.
Bullet is a Physics Engine which is Part of the BGE. Physics Engines can be part of a Game Engine but do not need to.
Lightwave is a 3D Modeller as Blender. Both are not part of a 3D Engine as they are not necessary to run a game. 3D Modeller are usually part of the Game Development Process.
Please do not confuse Game Engines with 3D Engines such as OGRE. They provide the render output only but are necessary for all Game Engines. They deal with the visual output of a game and are part of a Game Engine.
There are much more engines as part of a Game Engine:
- Sound Engine
- Logic System
- Network Engine
…
It might sound like you can combine any engine with any other engine. But this is not the case. There is no common standard that defines the interfaces. Which means a lot of people did a hard job to join all this engines to a working Game Engine.
Your job as a Game Developer is to create a cool game with the Game Engine ;). BTW. “cool” does not mean “photo-realistic” :evilgrin:.
The special of the BGE is it is integrated into Blender. This allows to directly run your game from the Blender rather then to export from the 3D Modeler and Import to the Game Engine which can be really annoying. This speeds up development a lot 8at least on small and medium projects).