Game Development Tutorials — Engines, Graphics Programming and C++ Game Development

Stockfish is an open source game engine and one of the best CPU chess engines in the world. It is free and Universal Chess Interface (UCI) compliant, distributed under under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3).  It is a fork of Glaurung engine, which is an open-source engine, developed by Tord Romstad and released in fall 2004. Glaurung was written in C and later versions were completely written in C++. The authors of this game engine are Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski and Gary Linscott.

Unreal Engines are series of graphics rendering and game development engines developed by Epic Games over the past 23 years. This game engine has brought tons of features and improvements in the gaming industry and other industries, pushing against the graphics rendering limits. They introduced Unreal Engine I, II, III, IV, and Unreal Engine 5 which is under development.

StepMania is an open-source game development engine written in C++, Assembly and Lua. It is not only a game development engine but also a cross-platform rhythm video game. StepMania was initially created as an emulator for Dance Dance Revolution, a game series of Konami arcade and has progressed since into an extendable rhythmic game development engine that has enough capability to support a number of rhythmic game options.

Spring is a free and multipurpose 3D Real-time Strategy (RTS) game engine. For scripting game specific code, it has extensively used “Lua” in order to make almost each aspect of the engine customizable, from AI unit to GUI, to path finding. Some part of the engine are also developed in C++. It is a cross-platform engine, which provides support for Windows, Linux and OS X. Spring is an open source software.

Source Game Development Engine is a successor to GoldSrc and developed by Valve Corporation. Source is written in C++ programming language and it’s SDKs can be compiled in multiple Visual Studio versions as well as GCC Compiler. This 3D game development engine that does not bear a numbering scheme for its versions because it is created in continuous progressive updates.

Snowdrop is a cross-platform game engine written in C++. A “node-based system” powers the core of this game engine. Initially, Massive Entertainment built this game engine for Personal Computers (PCs) and next-generation development to do “things better not bigger.” This engine is flexible and efficient that enables small teams to develop ambitious AAA games. The sole purpose of this outstanding game engine is to empower the developers.

ShiVa is a versatile video game development engine that comes up with an extensive built-in graphical editor developed to produce video games and apps for the web, game consoles, desktop PCs as well as cellular devices. It is a cross-platform game engine, you can export the games developed with ShiVa3D to over 20 target platforms.

RedEngine is another leading game development engine which itself is developed using C++ programming language. It is a project of CD Projekt and famous for their non-linear role-playing video games. RedEngine replaced the Aurora Engine that was originally under the license of Bioware and used for the development of The Witcher, CD Projekt Red previously took license from BioWare and started developing The Witcher.

Real Virtuality is one of the leading game engines developed in C++. One of the most interesting facts about the Real Virtuality gaming engine is licensed for use in the software for military training such as VBS1, VBS2 as well as VBS3 by Bohemia.