Advent and Progression of the Gaming Engine

The progression of technology has also facilitated a plethora of new creative industries, with game design being one of them. Although architecture has been around since the beginning of civilization, digital game design is a relatively new field that came about with the onset of the digital revolution. Historically, these were very separate fields, with architecture focusing on building design and physical drafting and game designers initially focusing on developing interactive two-dimensional scenario representations. But as technological advancements progressed, both fields have found themselves increasingly dependent on digital spatial environments. Architects moved from pencil and paper to three-dimensional CAD environments while virtual games shifted from two-dimensional representations such as “Pong, Space Invaders, PacMan, [and] Donkey Kong” to three-dimensional representations such as “Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb Abyss.”[1] (Fig. 1.3.1 - 4) Now as software and hardware continues to improve, both industries are approaching the territory of photorealistic visualizations. (Fig. 1.3.5 - 6) However, while this is the case, “this rapid development in computer game technology is almost unnoticed by the users of professional CAD-, GIS-, and illustration software.”[2] Architects, who produce designs for real-world applications, and game developers, who produce immersive digital experiences for people, both benefit from quality simulations in this modern age, and yet, architecture is lagging behind, as investigated in the past chapter (1.2). However, the potential to catch up is there. With game developers essentially tasked with simulating spaces and architects tasked with designing spaces; along with gaming graphics becoming increasingly realistic, and architecture depending more on computation; the fields are beginning to overlap, and as such, the integration and unification of skill sets, workflows, and tools within these respective industries is becoming increasingly beneficiary.

The most notable of these tools with regards to architectural visualization is undoubtedly the game engine, which can be described as a “collection of modules of simulation code that do not directly specify the game’s behavior (game logic) or [the] game’s environment (level data).”[3] As such, one can think of these engines as a form of Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that is specialized in game creation, or more generally, “an assemblage of reusable software functionalities.”[4]

The origin of these game engines can be described as a product of necessity—to handle the increased complexity of modern games—as well as cost—to provide increased efficiency and cost savings compared to building a game from scratch.[5] It achieves this by prioritizing “concepts such as reusability (a given GE is not tied to one game but can be used for different games), modularity (how an object can be accessed and modified in the GE) and extensibility (the possibility of adding extra functionalities to a given GE).”[6] As such, the computational infrastructure of the game engine itself is comprised of many sub-systems that are brought together within one application software,