The evolution of game engines

Well!! Be honest! and tell me that how many times have you bought or downloaded a game, and realised that its not supported by your hardware, or how many times you have felt jealous of your friend, who manages to play a game smoothly which just keeps on hiccuping in your system. You curse your graphics card, you say to himself that may be time has come for an upgrade. Your graphics card is not the sole one to be blamed, there is a small thing called graphics engine/game engine which powers almost everything in the game, just like an automobile engine that runs the vehicle.
Gone are the days when, people used to play games for free. Well, obviously,some games even these days come for free, but they are really minority, also you just don't get the same satisfaction level. Ever wondered about thosr jargons like pixel shaders, vertex shaders, anti aliasing?
The graphics engine may justly be referred as the heart of any game. In most of cases this is the area, which takes most of the time of the designer team.After it is built, usually programmers build the maps or levels that actually people play. But game engines may safely be regarded as the main task of game development. This is why "Valve" took almost 4 years to release "Half life 2".Its SOURCE engine may very well be marked as an revolution in gaming industry. After the engine is built, some companies just do so some minor modifications to use the same modified engine in their newer games, "Battlefield 2142" came very shortly after "Battlefield 2" . They both use the same engine with only minor modification, some companies just sell the engine to some other parties, SAGE is one such engine which has experienced many owners.
Prior to game engines, games were written as singular entities, right from the ground level to achieve the optimal usage of graphics hardware-- this was termed as Kernel by the developers.
The first generation of 3rd party game engines was mainly dominated by 3 players. Viz. BRender from Argonaut Software, Renderware from Criterion Software Limited and RenderMorphics' Reality Lab .However reality lab was taken over by Microsoft and was turned into Direct3D. Renderware was eventually taken over by Electronic Arts [EA]

In the next post, we will discuss more about the evolution of Game Engines and we will try to dig the past of some epical engines like the unreal engine , the SOURCE engine or the Quake engine

contd....