C++ Game Engines

hello everybody mike here at game from scratch and one of the most common questions i get is what game measure can i use to develop in c plus plus now i'm not telling you that you should develop in c plus but this is a question i get asked so often that i figured i'd do this video basically we're going to look at game engines that can be scripted or programmed using the c plus plus or c programming language so that means a modern game engine still under development those are my two caveats so a couple didn't make the list potentially because i can't tell if they're still under development for example uh gameplay 3d game brio and the hero engine i'm not 100 sure that all of those are still being maintained so they didn't make the list and there's a couple i put on this list mostly because if i didn't people were gonna call me on it even though i don't think they really fit but that said there are two dozen at least engines on this list uh coming from triple a style game engines to smaller hobbyist oriented open source projects what fits perfectly for you really is up to you but without further ado let's jump in and take a look at um game edges that could be programmed using the c plus plus programming language again that just means that they actually the end user creates their game potentially or parts of their game using c plus so game engines such as unity that is written using c plus aren't included in the list because unless you buy the pro version you can't program in c plus once at all c sharp is the primary programming mechanism there all right without further ado let's jump in now this entire list is available up on game from scratch uh and there will also be a learn more link next to it if i've already done a video profiling that particular game engine uh also keep in mind these are in no particular order although i have um ruined a couple of them for you on this list without further ado let's jump in now first off we have cryengine cryengine pretty predictable they're moving more towards uh let's see they're using their visual programming language and c sharp as their scripting language but right now you can still develop a full game using c plus plus in cryengine cryengine is a triple a quality game engine you probably know don't know about it at this point in time and if you know about cryengine you know about lumberyard basically uh amazon forked a license of cryengine 3.4 ish somewhere around there three point something and they've kind of gone on their own with it same kind of concept completely free to use as long as you use amazon's networking stack uh so if you host it in the cloud you've got to use amazon technologies to do so uh but otherwise it is completely free again aaa quality it's being used for making some uh oh god what the hell is it called star citizen for example um so definitely a aaa style engine and definitely programmable using c plus plus but they've also got their own lua interface as well by the way uh next up we have obviously unreal engine probably the one that comes to mind people say what game engine can i use to write c plus plus well unreal engine unreal engine has c plus scripting as a first class citizen um it's actually got real time compiled or rebel style so basically uh as you type the code it's almost being treated like a scripting language they've done a lot of work to basically make it so you don't have to do a compile to work with it so it makes class work a lot like a scripting language of course there's also their visual system called blueprints and a couple of other ones available via plug-in but the primary programming interface for unreal engine is probably still c plus in this day and age uh next up we have ogre now ogre comes with an asterisk behind it because ogre technically is not a game engine it's a game renderer it's got more than a renderer and less than an engine so you're missing things like audio um physics etc those are things you have to add yourself potentially i don't think there's any input handling in there as well so there's some pieces you're going to have to slot in from other sources to make this onto a full-blown game engine but it is entirely c plus plus base has been used to make a number of commercial projects so uh definitely do consider ogre if c plus is your thing uh next up we have the g3d innovation engine now this page does not sell it as well as it should this is an engine that's been around for 15 20 years it's kind of a cross between a triple a game engine and an academic project so if you're looking to learn rendering techniques etc you can use this engine but if you're looking to create a game with triple a style graphics effects you could potentially use this engine as well i've somewhat recently checked this guy out so if you are interested do click that learn more link and check out g3d innovation engine in action it's a very impressive engine next up we have good dough now the godot game engine is on this list kinda uh i got to be honest you don't really program your game using c plus plus with godot you can you shouldn't but you can now what you can do though is easily first off extend godot completely open source project on top of that there's gd native a way of binding any kind of native code into it and there's also a module system where you can basically create your entire game as modules that run inside of the godot engine so i've included it here if you are a c plus developer godot is very friendly to you but i don't think from a workflow perspective you're going to want to do things entirely in c plus plus but i think that's true in a lot of cases to be honest so i threw godot on this list but the primary way you work with godot is generally through gd script and more commonly through c sharp but you can complete an entire game if you want using c plus plus and the godot game engine just not sure i would all right next up we have uh torque 3d now talks 3d i actually thought was gone away and it seems to have been back basically years ago um i think it was tribes um tribes was open source they kind of spun off the engine it used to be 99 bucks now it's completely free this game engine has been around for a very long time apparently it is still under active development and you use they have their own scripting language i think i think they've binded to a third-party scripting language as well but you can also do your game fully completely in c plus using the torque engine if you prefer next up we have banshee 3d banshee 3d is a it's a maturing product i've checked this out a couple times check the learn more link if you want to see in an action just do be sure to build it from code yourself the uh binary is the last time i checked we're quite out of date but this is a c plus plus 14 code based engine you can develop completely in c plus plus 14 but they're also doing um c sharp style bindings for it as well now um there's also an underlying engine that banshee has built on top of called the bs framework uh that is the low level c pulse plus library so if you actually want to create your own game engine you can actually use that underlying c plus plus code base to create your own you know editor and engine this kind of stuff from it so change is definitely one of those wants to check out it's a smaller project with a smaller community uh but it's also incredibly impressive now next up we have and i included this one just to be thorough to be honest because i don't know valve seems to have kind of abandoned it uh source engine and source two engine we're both c scriptable um you basically developed your game using c plus these are the underlying technology behind half-life 2 dota 2 uh and the likes you can download the sdk for modifying games created with source 1 and source 2 but i don't know how you can actually license source 2 anymore there is oft rumored source 3 in the works as well but then again half-life 3 is also rumored to be in the works so i put this one on mostly just so people say don't say hey what about source because realistically it's just not viable to create a game using source in this day and age i don't even think valve licensing anymore except we have lyman engine i just covered this one a couple of days ago 100 a hobbyist project this is one of those things that if you just want to you know roll your own or jump in and learn from you might want to check out lyman it's pretty impressive for what i can do it's got a built-in editor a completely modern c plus plus 14 code base um cross platform definitely worth checking out if you're kind of more on the hobbyist side now this isn't really a competitive to the likes of say unreal or cryengine a completely different league but if you're looking for more of a hobbyist take leiman engine might be right for you next up we have id tech now i also included this one mostly just to be complete to be honest this one kind of falls under the same category as source but not really because ironically actually source engine was built on id tech and early version and idtech basically is the underlying technology used behind games like doom and quake every year um john carmack would roll his own new game engine and they would make an older version available for free and then it was under split licensing you can grab them under gpl license for basically making non-commercial open source games or you could buy a closed source license now why i'm not necessarily including this in this list well first off since about idtech four they switched to the c plus plus programming language um so i detect four five and six were all cpus plus base and you can download those i think i hope i'm not talking out my butt on six but for sure four and five are downloadable and usable and licensed willing commercial games after the fact are still being released using this technology but uh now that john carmack is no longer at id software who knows what's gonna happen with future iterations of id tech uh they are still working on it uh doom eternal is being released under id tech seven but that was very much a john carmack policy that was releasing the source code for each of these engines so i don't know if you'll be able to license this stuff or if bethesda software is going to make it tech available only in-house so this one may fall off the list as time goes on okay next up we have lead works leadworks leadwerks yeah leadworks uh this is one it's up on steam they're just finishing a port lead works five i think it's the newest version uh 100 c pulse plus based uh there is scripting available so you gotta have the professional edition in order to be able to work in c plus plus otherwise you are working in lua kind of falls in between a commercial engine and a hobbyist engine somewhere along those lines it's constantly for sale up on um steam so wait for that new version to come out and keep an eye on it because this is definitely i don't know it'll be interesting to see where lead works five actually goes or lead works five um but this one is constantly for sale up on steam now next up we have erlicht our ir lick um i believe licked is light in german but i might be making that up uh this is actually the same guy as uh copper cube uh he's actually made a number of different game engines ir lick is an open source c plus plus powered game engine it's inspired by ober it's got a large active community uh so if you are looking for an open source c plus plus based game engine 3d game engine uh ir lick definitely is worth checking out next up we have erho 3d now earhole 3d has been quietly being developed in the background for ages and ages and ages and there was actually a spin-off engine that is not immediately coming to me oh god what the hell is it called yeah it doesn't really matter because that project's defunct now anyways which was unfortunate because it looked really cool but earl 3d is an open source project you can also script in um let's see they used angel script i think it was and potentially lua now or maybe c sharp now oh you definitely can do a c sharp now because they've actually got erho sharp which is a c sharp port of the erho 3d game engine that's being maintained by xamarin the people that actually wrote mono so um it's again cross platform open source full feature 3d game engine it's got its own editor they have there's a little bit ugly but definitely fully capable um so if you're looking for something along the lines of an open source engine or project to work with or how 3d might be one worth checking out i also did a feature of this one in part of my the others theory so if you're interested in learning more about erho3d do click that learn more link next up we have toy engine toy engine is a whole lot like lyman engine uh it's a hobbyist c plus project that has been open sourced in this particular case he's basically trying to be patron-backed it's got a full editor definitely uh immature at this point it needs more development it is not production ready but it is completely open source and c plus based if that's your thing um i also recently did a video on this one if you are interested again click that learn more link and we have panda 3d now this one you might think hey wait a minute isn't that a python engine well yeah and no it's entirely c plus plus scriptable or python scriptable i think in some cases they've actually got examples for both open source project a very cool engine it's been around forever it actually used to be a commercial engine at disney for making mmo rpgs including one called toontown which apparently a lot of people have nostalgic feelings for i've personally never played it never heard of it before i found this engine but this is definitely a production tested engine and there is a um pbr based renderer option out there that makes it look very very good if you're also interested in this one i feature this in the others as well click that learn more button and watch the video on panda 3d so again looks like a python engine but it's also fully c-plus plus and then we have a senthol i think uh i checked this one out quite a while ago this one again is a commercial engine available up on steam i did a video about it and i've promptly forgotten everything else about it since i've been in development a long time really really really good quality graphics c plus is the programming language it's up on steam and it's on sale all the time there's a free version to check out as well and at one point in time i i did i remembered what the engine did and click to learn more and find out what i don't remember now uh next up we got tombstone engine i actually have no experience with tombstone engine but i do have a lot of experience with its predecessor which is the c4 engine the c4 engine was one of those first um affordable commercial game engines for indie developers and tombstone kind of continues that whole idea on it's professional development 204 playstation 4 windows mac and linux and c plus plus based and i think that's where i leave here because i actually i don't know much more about this engine which you know what i i do need to uh check this guy out in more detail so do keep an eye out i'll probably do something on the tombstone engine at some point in the future i don't personally know a whole lot more but i do know it is the successor to the c4 engine which you may or may not have heard of next up we have the fire engine which has by far and away the coolest name of any game engine out there bar none which is funny because i don't traditionally think of sony as having the greatest sense of humor um but that's exactly what this is this is a sony r d game engine it started off for the playstation 2 i think um and it was back then when they made basically a processor chip that nobody knew how to use the cell processor so it might be ps3 i don't know one of those two when they switched their architecture completely uh they needed to roll their own game engine actually show people how to go ahead and use it now the funny thing is they made this game engine available for everyone else to use regardless of what platform you work on it is completely freely available c plus plus game engine and it was worked on by the developers for behind naughty dog to actually extend upon it but it now supports um playstation vr applications and you think okay well i don't need a playstation engine well look at this one playstation 4 playstation 3 playstation vita windows google android and apple ios and that is kind of misleading because there's also games that were created using the fire engine where all supported to xbox xbox one as well as the nintendo switch so this little sony powered engine has powered over 200 game titles and we're talking a lot of titles things you've definitely heard of unravel um rabbids see this one is on oh no that's not rabbits that's a different game just looks like rabbits uh unraveled sweet poncho uh oleoli ii uh hotline miami a a whole lot of games you've heard of flow they go on and on there's actually some pretty high quality almost aaa style games that have actually been used using the fire engine so it's kind of one of those shocking technologies that a lot of people haven't actually heard of which is funny because it's been around for 15 years it's completely free to use it's totally cross-platform it is production proven and so on so uh fire engine is definitely one to check out one of those ones i should feature on this channel sometime i actually think i didn't though because of nda limitations so i'm not 100 certain on that one i'll check it out again maybe do some future fire engine content this was definitely going to be part of my other series um but i discontinued that one and next up we have unigine 2. now this one you know probably from the um band bandwidth uh benchmarking software unigene it's one of the most popular used 3d benchmarks for you know tech tv shows things like uh oh god none of them are coming to mind but you know tech crunch no not tech crunch uh tom's hardware etc they would often benchmark using the unigine engine well it's actually a game engine sort of it's not really aimed at games unigine definitely is straight out of benchmarking software but they have a full sdk the problem is it's kind of got a weird pricing structure in that it costs i think about a thousand bucks to get into it oh way more so 1500 through uh 10 grand through quotas and it's aimed more at that whole engineering and sim market but for gamers here you can see it now i have heard from a little birdie however that there is thoughts or works towards creating an indie version of the unigene game engine um so it could be interesting to see exactly where that goes it's been used to make a couple of games um but it's kind of relatively unknown outside of the benchmarking software it's very very pretty unfortunately they don't have a demo or a time limited version or anything like that that i could get my hands on and when i actually applied for the the try thing they didn't get back to me so i've not know i have no personal hands-on experiences with the unigine engine but i threw it in here for completeness and next up we have shiva now shiva is only available in c splotch if you get one of the pro-ish versions and in that case it's still a lot like um uh godot in that you know you're mostly creating modules to extend the shiva engine as opposed to shiva itself this is the strangest engine it's been quite this quiet this private beta forever and it looks so cool but it's just not accessible to me so i have no idea if it's any good but if you get the good version or the premium version or the pro version or whatever we're gonna call it you do get c plus plus uh plug and support available to extend the engine but you need to use shiva advanced edition so that part's kind of unfortunate otherwise you are using lua for your game development now again this game engine has been here and in development and new versions released all the time but it's in this closed private beta thing so got no idea what this engine's actually like to use there is a trial i think but it was really outdated okay so there is an updated version of it so maybe i will check this one out for the channel sometime in the future and that is it that is our list now once again the entire list is available right here now no doubt i have missed things off this list you know um i don't know all of them and when i was going through the engine i may have forgotten some there are a few again i didn't include such as gameplay 3d because i can't tell if it's still under development apparently there is a gameplay for out there i'd love to see it because i loved gameplay 3d but it hadn't hasn't seen a github commit in like three or four years so it's kind of feeling dead to me uh ditto for um net immerse engine or game bureau or whatever it's called these days basically the engine that previously used to power or still does actually apparently in a modified form the elder scrolls games was written using game brio as were tons of other pieces of software but um it was bought out and then in a strange kind of uh i don't know i don't know if you can license it you'll go to the web page try to figure out if it's being developed and you can get back to me because it's very confusing otherwise i would have thrown it on the list but they also never really made it available to people so um you could only really trial it so i didn't include it i didn't include older engines that are no longer developed like lift tech etc but if i did miss something that is still actively being developed c plus is one of the possible scripting languages i would love to hear about it in the comments down below either on game from scratch or here on youtube and hopefully that list was useful so if you are a c plus plus developer looking for a game engine to work with i just gave you a whole bunch of options now if you are kind of just still overwhelmed with what to check out here let me narrow it down a little bit for you if you're looking to create a commercial game using c pulse plus unreal engine is probably your best bet uh if you're looking for a research product g3d is hard to beat i think everybody if you have not checked out g3d even just for giggles go check that one out definitely worth seeing um things like the banshee engine the lyman engine the toy engine those are all very very interesting and entirely um you know they're hobby based but the source code is completely out there and approachable so if that's kind of area you're aiming for do definitely check those out i'm a big fan of the panda 3d engine although i would probably be a python programmer to use it um it's getting a little older but it's still very actively underdeveloped and uh the fire engine is still like the coolest thing ever i'm going to check out to see if i can actually do videos on it if so i will actually do some content on the fire engine it's weird because it's if you google on fire engine or go to youtube on fire engine you will find almost nothing and i think part of that is down to the nda which is weird because this engine has been used to make so many products so those are the ones i would definitely recommend checking out of this list now of course the godot engine if you are looking to do primarily uh using another language but extensibility using c plus plus this is probably one of the easiest so of the engines where extending it using c splush godot is definitely one to check out if the if you're actually looking to create your entire game using godot in c plus i don't know what the hell should do it i highly recommend against it but you can so i'm including it but it is very very very easy to extend godot especially with their new gd native link area so if you're looking to primarily develop using a more productive or higher level language but you want to have that you know high level extensibility without necessarily jumping into or recompiling it uh the good doe engine is definitely one to check out between the module support and the gd native bindings for binding in c plus plus and other native code based on groups into it so yeah those would be my recommendations and if you're looking for aaa and unreal engine just didn't do it for you definitely check out cryengine now cryogen is moving more towards c sharp and i think you're going to start seeing a lot of their documentation move away from c plus plus and towards c sharp or semantic they're built in um the visual programming language so it'll be interesting to see where this one goes and if neither of those work for you on a triple a level then check out lumberyard i don't know this is something with the way lumberyard's developing that i'm just not that excited by it's the lack of documentation or interest but i think it's also not really aimed at the indie hobbyist i think it's aimed more at the aaa style studios and that's why it's just kind of a little bit less interesting to me overall so those are about two dozen c plus plus game engines hope you found something in there of interest something new to you if again if i missed something please do let me know in the comments down below if you're currently working with one of these engines or you worked with one of these engines in the past and you recommend people stay the hell away from it or you highly recommend it also let me know that in the comments down below alright that's it for now i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 106,231

Keywords: C++, CPP, Game Engine, GameDev, Game Development, Game Programming, CryEngine, Lumberyard, Panda3D, Leadwerks, Unreal ENgine, UE4, Ogre3D, idtech, esenthel, Godot

Id: FaINy9iA5Kw

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018