Game Engine - First-person Shooter Engines

First-person Shooter Engines

A well-known subset of game engines are 3D first-person shooter (FPS) game engines. Groundbreaking development in terms of visual quality is done in FPS games on the human scale. While flight and driving simulators and real-time strategy (RTS) games increasingly provide realism on a large scale, first-person shooters are at the forefront of computer graphics on these smaller scales.

The development of the FPS graphic engines that appear in games can be characterized by a steady increase in technologies, with some breakthroughs. Attempts at defining distinct generations lead to arbitrary choices of what constitutes a highly modified version of an 'old engine' and what is a brand-new engine.

The classification is complicated as game engines blend old and new technologies. Features that were considered advanced in a new game one year become the expected standard the next year. Games with a mix of older generation and newer feature are the norm. For example Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) introduced physics to the FPS games, but it did not become common until around 2002. Red Faction (2001) featured destructible walls and ground, something still not common in engines years later (for example in Unreal Tournament 2004 there are still no destructible objects). Battlezone (1998) and Battlezone II: Combat Commander (1999) added vehicle based combat to the usual FPS mix, which did not hit the mainstream until later. Tribes 2, Battlefield 1942, Halo: Combat Evolved, and Unreal Tournament 2004 fully realized the potential for vehicular-combat and first person shooter integration.