Game Engines

Increasingly, game developers are licensing game engines rather than writing their own so they can focus on the story rather than on the technology. The Wine community might want to focus some effort on supporting these game engines so games developed using them have a better chance of running on Wine.

Wine's App Database doesn't have a category for game engine yet; perhaps we should create one. (It does have one for game tools, but that's not quite the same.)

Here are a few lists of engines:

• http://www.devmaster.net/engines/ (querying for DirectX yields 151 hits)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

• http://gpwiki.org/index.php/Game_Engines

Here are a few recent articles rating the best or most frequently used game engines:

• The Engine Survey, results (Mark De Loura, Gamasutra, 2009)

• The Top 10 Game Engines Revealed (Develop magazine, 2009)

Here's a list of game engines with freely downloadable SDKs or IDEs which could conceivably be used to write test suites for Wine:

Here's a Google Trends search showing Gamestudio, FPS Creator, UDK, and Unity3d, and another showing Gamestudio, Ogre3d, Blitz3d, and Panda3d. It seems clear that UDK and Unity3d have lots of momentum recently.

There are also a number of game engines that aren't freely downloadable but that do have freely downloadable technology demos:

• http://www.terathon.com/c4engine -> http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21717

And then there are demoscene http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type[=demotool tools]! For instance,

• OldSkool DemoMaker