Which game engine?

[geniesser]

Hi,

I just wanted to know.
Are you using a special game engine or libraries for Prison Architect
or did you program the game engine completely on your own?
And which languages are you using

Greetings

[Jack5500]

Hi,

I just wanted to know.
Are you using a special game engine or libraries for Prison Architect
or did you program the game engine completely on your own?
And which languages are you using

Greetings

C++ for sure and SML, I believe. Not so sure about the second one

[paktsardines]

Pretty sure they're using a variation of the Defcon engine, which used a variation of the Darwinia engine, which used a variation of the Uplink engine.

[xander]

Pretty sure they're using a variation of the Defcon engine, which used a variation of the Darwinia engine, which used a variation of the Uplink engine. :P

Nonono! They're using a variation of the Subversion engine, which is a set of libraries added onto the Defcon engine, which is built on top of the Darwinia engine, which incorporates the Uplink engine. Sheesh!

xander

[paktsardines]

1.open cheek
2.insert tongue

[Mas Tnega]

1.open cheek
2.insert tongue

I think there may be a grain a truth somewhere in there.

[da'jobat]

They're using their own engine which has been in development since Uplink (but had a total rewrite for darwinia).
Source: I interviewed them. Article will be going up soon once I cut the interview down from 5000 words.

[GenericJoe]

I heard a rumour they used the Unity engine and I will be able to play this on my iPhone!! Joke :p

[paktsardines]

I heard they were using Crytek's CryEngine 3, but had to change because players could dismantle trucks and fire.

[Mas Tnega]

You don't even want to know about the Havok incident...

[Legion303]

Turtles all the way down. At least that's how it feels when I set a huge foundation.

[ElectricGlow]

I was going to ask if there is any possibility of having multiple cores utilized by the game - using separate threads.

Of course, for a programmer, that's a lot like taking a car into the mechanic and saying "Hey, I want you to take the four-cylinder engine out and replace it with eight. Can you do that in two hours?"

[plumbob]

This isn't just running Simple Directmedia Layer? http://www.libsdl.org/

Patching the darwania engine into this would be killing a fly with a sledge hammer, that does a lot of stuff this game just doesn't need it to do.

As to electric glow's comment. Sometimes multi threading is really easy, sometimes it isn't. It tend to be easy to multi thread loops, but since games are just one really big loop that presents some unique problems. Of course I write code for banks not video games, so maybe I'm out of my depth.

[cyberis]

I'm impressed with the fact that the engine is just under a MB in size and in alpha works as well as it does on my little wind up laptop. That mean its written in C or C++ and its their own custom engine. CryEngine is a resource hog as are most AAA engines out there. Even my favorite engine, the Unreal Engine, is pretty big and would be super overkill for a game that is doing resource management with all of the little objects interacting and doing their own thing. Those AAA engines would puke if they had to update all those sprites and their complex interactions (we're talking thousands to tens of thousands of interacting objects). Those engines are great at rendering complex scenes but not at processing complex sprite interactions with 1,000's of sprites, and certainly not in the space of a MB or 2 and with the small amount of computer resources it works with.

[PsyKzz]

Using a big engine like Unreal or CryEngine would just have to much overhead.
This application as it currently stands isn't anything special in terms of the micro-management your talking about, any of the engines would be able to deal with that, but none of them have anything special about that that makes them good at it.

If Chris was to use them, he would still have to do most of the work himself in terms of the game.
The issue would then be that Chris would have to have made his own anyway but would also have to load all the crap that comes with that engine.