Unreal Engine powers everything from Fortnite to Game-of-the-Year winners. Here’s how UE5’s Nanite and Lumen work, the games it built, Unreal vs Unity, pricing, and how to start.
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.
Two engines, one confusing name. Source is source-available and non-commercial; Source 2 is proprietary and has never been released. Here’s what each one runs, and exactly what Valve lets you build.
ShiVa put 3D games on the iPhone before most people thought it was practical. In March 2023 its makers stopped selling it and stopped fixing it. Here’s the status, and the migration path its own team recommended.
REDengine carried The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 to glory, then CD Projekt Red retired it for Unreal Engine 5. The full story of a landmark engine.
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.
C# ships the most games, C++ earns the most money, and GDScript is rising fast. The 2026 guide to choosing your game development language.
qfusion no longer means one repository — it means three, and they have diverged. Here’s the upstream, Warsow’s fork and Warfork’s, when each was last touched, and which one to build from.
Pyrogenesis is an open-source, multi-platform 3D engine for Real-Time Strategy games. It was developed by WildFire Games in 2001. It is written in C++ and JavaScript. Pyrogenesis supports Windows, OS X and Linux. It is licensed under GPL (General Public License).
PLIB is a set of multi-platform and open source libraries for the development of games. It is written by Steve Baker in 1997. PLIB is written in C++. It supports Windows, Linux, UNIX and MacOS. PLIB is licensed under Library GNU Public License (LGPL 2.0). The latest and the stable version of PLIB is v.1.8.5 that was released in October, 2006.
PhyreEngine quietly powered Journey, Gravity Rush, and Falcom’s RPGs. How Sony’s free engine worked, who used it, and where it stands today.
