Game engine

#1 About 4-7 years for a good one with 20 -50 developers. Thats what I read in a book and they where talking about Unreal.

#2 Can you tell me an exact reference for that it's for a project/paper that i'm working on. Thanks

#3 It depends on the scope of the engine. A gifted programmer could make a 2D engine in a day, though it may not be extremely feature complete or bug tested...but it would be an engine. A team of programmers can work years to create a robust "game engine".

You need to define what type of engine, the specifics, etc. before asking such a massively open-ended question. It is like asking how long does it take to make a dream come true? It depends on the size and scope of the dream. It may be minutes or it may be a lifetime, or it may never come to fruition.

#4 The unreal engine is the unreal engine...in 2006 it costed about $600.000, i don't know now. The time to make a game engine depends of many things, but a little group of programmers (3-6) could make a **simple** one in about 1 year, it depends...

#5 Sorry I should have been more specific, a 3D FPS game engine, something that would support the starter.fps style of game play.

#6 Still not specific enough.

"from scratch"?

Do you mean without using anyone elses code? Just sitting down with a compiler and starting writing line by line of code? That would depend on the programmers education, experience, typing speed, endurance/fatigue, etc.

There is no real answer.

I have a friend with a degree in computer sciences and several years experience programming in C++. Using many reference sources and getting help from many people on IRC, he was able to write a basic Castle Wolfenstein style 3D engine in about 3 months. That's without any prior 3D engine coding experience, coding about 2 hours a day, in the evenings after coding eight hours a day for a day job.

Just to clarify, he wrote the graphical display engine in a few days, but took awhile to make it useful. Also, that was almost 10 years ago, when Doom was still pretty cool, and Quake was new. Ken Silverman took almost four years for his Build engine. advsys.net/ken/build.htm

More Links:
www.arenanet.com/articles/patarticle.php

Apparently the original engine that Torque is based on took three years to develop.
www.otakunozoku.com/Articles/ProductReviews/TorqueGameEngine/TorqueGameEngine.ht...

I don't know if that helps or not, but good luck with your paper!

Give more details.

Do you mean just the graphics engine, or a complete game?
How many programmers?
How much experience do they have?
How much education do they have?
How much detail does the engine need? Graphics? Audio? Networking?
Do they need help from artists, musicians, others?
Are they being paid or is this a hobby? How many hours a day coding?
Does the game have to be fun or just functional?

Give as much info as you can and we'll try to help you out.

Tony

#7 Thanks Tony. I found what I was looking for, it was just a reference that would back up why I used TGE instead of making it from scratch. I had 4 months and the game/virtual environment is what I wanted. I've been programming in C for four years,i'm an engineer not a computer science wiz so I knew that I didn't have the time or the inclination to build the engine myself.
Thanks

#8 Look guy, when Dynamix did Tribes1 it was not there first game... Earthsiege I and II, then Starsiege, THEN TRIBES1.... All using almost exact same stuff.... but each time getting better...


Game engines can take a LONG time to create, you need to create a renderer, a way to handle events, some sort of physics platform to handle the way things move. Then you gotta do other stuff to handle input like walking and flying.... gotta implement things to support picture formats, and model formats, a BUNCH of sh*t.