Your idea of the ideal game engine

What features would you love to see, or be able to do, in your ideal game engine? It can be 2D, 3D, a particular pipeline feature, a way of rendering, an approach to animation, something that facilitates your artistic vision, etc. Go wild.

Well, I've yet to see anything as easy to use, yet flexible/powerful as Blitz3D, TBH.

An example being?

There are many examples of great stuff written with Blitz3D. Do you want a specific example?

It may not be perfect but I didn't claim it was. I just said it's about the best game 'engine' I've seen, yet.

Engines are like hair... Only your own will ever suit you best! :)

Dabz

Really depends what your definition of "engine" is. ? My toolset has fx, sprites, tile map, gui, etc, but I'm not sure if that qualifies as an engine because you're not limited to any specific genere.

There's only 2 engines I could consider as the optimal solution:
1) CMax3D for all platforms and low to mid-end hardware
2) Leadwerks for high-end hardware but also best results
With CMax3D I mean a port of Max3D to C like it has been already done with iMiniB3D.
Leadwerks should be also ported to C.

how can you have Max3D as an 'optimal' solution when it doesn't even exist yet?

Not just Max3D, but a hypothetical rewrite of Max3D in another language.

Apparently not existing, not being in development and not even having a published list of specs or features is no barrier to being the optimal solution these days. Optimal sure ain't what it used to be.

Of course it's an optimal solution, as today there is none.

ok...well Mega3DEngineofAwesomeness is my optimal engine, just as soon as it exists, and converted so I can program it on my toaster. :)

Have you looked at irrlicht?

I am working on my personal project with BMax since Summer 2005 and so far I am fnished with round about 70 percent (currently tells me Jim Browns framework assisstant: 108.013 code lines, 23.028 remark lines).

My ideal 2D-not-neccessary-games-only-(usable also for simulations, teachings, presentations, generation of animated movies raw material and other purposes fulfilling)-engine shall have the following key features:

-a world editor integrated for runtime,
-a script language as a subset of BlitzMax's syntax (missing is TYPE and the related OO-functionality, which makes sense, as scripts are thought to be just modifications of compiled code or experimental variations of code to have an instant result),
-a GUI editor at runtime with customizable gadgets (as the GUI is as part of a projects artwork as is the worlds content itself),
-a memory management system to split the worlds content into arbitrary parts, which can be loaded or saved individually.

It will be able to deal with all 2D-topics (Point and click, Match3, hidden objects, Plattformers, ISO-Games) and in fact will be able to run any type of 3D-looking-games also (user may only notice a restriction through the limitation of cameras rotation, rotates around y and z only).

..having said that majority of folks here are looking from programming point of view, ideal solution will be B3D with supper dupper features list such as Crysis engine for example (features wise, not editor or any other tool, simply B3D with this featureset) and with stability of old B3D...on that way it will keep door open for any type of genre you wanna play with and of course suits you with nice framework to build up your own tools, whatever it is...of course, if its multiplatform, for me, pretty much every other solution out there can kiss goodbye..

Something that lets me make what I want to make...easily.

I always wanted the ease of Blitz with portability of Torque. Unity fits the bill and then some.

Some "light" 2D/3D engine, with a particle fx editor (so it can be easily imported into any project, 2D and 3D), a GUI editor (so I can visually make menus and the such), an object dropper, suport for multiple 3D listeners, being able to play more than 1 music at once, all streamed from disk... the list can go on and on.

The best thing is: "anything that can make game development faster, and easier, without loosing performance".

Ok so ease of creating good results seems to be quite important.

What about specific features? Types of lighting/shadows/shading? Drawing tools? Animation features?

2D engine:
* Full weather and lighting effects
* OO design
* Built in delta, or fixed, timing
* GUI that is entirely skinnable
* Cross-platform
* Particle system (think Irrlicht)
* Easy to extend and to create your own weather effects (with access to common weather state)

3D engine:
(Copy from above, and..)
* Support for the latest and greatest (bump-mapping, terrain brushes, DOF, HDR [lol], super-huge terrains [managed by 'chunks' - think Oblivion], etc..)
* Physics (Newton is awesome)
* Shadows
* Animated models (with shadows)
* Terrain (brushes!) and object placer tool
* Automagical LOD
* Speedy tree system

Ideal!

Most of all, it has to be stable, and work the same on all platforms :P

When reading through this thread i realise that my ideal game engine would look quite different. You could write a lot about this, just a few draft thoughts. It should be affordable, rock solid, easy to use (programming (syntax, oo, few but well thought out commands/concepts) and editor (scene, logic, shaders, sounds)), well documented, crossplatform available, support certain platforms like (web, iPodTouch, Win, OSX), not bloated (dev as well as releases), support those features you really need, steady information flow with the developer, just for the fun it should enable you making 2d/3d adventures out of the box and it would be available right now.

Plash what kind of weather are you thinking of, like to see rain drop and snowflakes falling and accumulating? Clouds and such? Night and day type of stuff?

Also is there demand for GPGPU stuff or like doing particles/physics on the GPU?

And how about animation, do you prefer to work with key frames, tweening, morphing, etc?

And for designing your levels/objects, what kind of drawing tools? I would think that brushes are at least the most basic and simplest to implement, something like the tools in zBrush where you paint in 3d?

Crap, with my weather system you would just enter the time and position on earth (other planets will be supported later on) and if you want, you can go back in time and for instance enjoy how big vulcanos spit out lava and ash rains down on you.

I don't think the ideal game engine would run on all crappy platforms in ideal mode. I would be easier to say that the ideal game engine runs only on the ideal platform in ideal mode. That's how consoles work too.

On the other hand, it would be also nice that the same code runs on all crappy platforms, so the ideal engine should automatically remove stuff which don't work on lower platforms.

I kind of like that approach to - to make it reasonably backwards compatible where possible with slower hardware or with less supported features. At least that gives people the ability to use it even if they have to tolerate slower speeds.

Realtime Global Illumination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination
Constructive Solid Geometry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_solid_geometry

I can safely say some of these engines in progress appear to be incredibly powerful. My high level toolset pales in comparison to what some of you have in development. wow...

Is CSG the preferred modelling tool for most people?

Grey's framework was pretty ideal for me - but you can't get it now. You snooze you loose.

Visualy CSG is a bit meh, but has the benefit of simplifying things to make modding easy so anyone can create something out of simple primitives. Personaly I find the lack of flexibility tedious and takes the fun out of building things.

For me? Blitzmax with a 3d module working in Mac, Windows and the iphone would be it...

I would actually be happy with iPhone support. I would pay for each any day. That is more important to me than the 3d engine, but I would pay for both. Actually if Mark cares to start selling licenses for comercial usage of max3d (being open source does not mean its free as in beer) my credit card is right here and ready for it.

In my dreams Mark would allow a third party to create the iPhone version of max2d/max3d and sell it...

I think blitzmax is great, I am very happy with it.

PLS

Intuitive API - It should feel natural to use, and be quick to pick up.
Cross platform
Cross language
Cross API
Object oriented
Allows for completely data driven games. Start removing the code and technical stuff, focus on the creative as much as possible.
Batteries included. ie, contains everything needed to to create a game, no need to find and use outside libraries unless...
Extensible - ....you want to extend it, or prefer to use your own systems in place of the ones builtin to the engine.
Good performance
Stable
Suitable for all types of games ( 2d, 3d, racing, shoot em ups, fighting, rts, mmorpg )

I guess that all sounds kind of obvious. :)

But I've been working towards all that. At least for 2d games. Still got tons of gaps and missing pieces, but I'm very happy with whats there thus far.

Soon its time to buckle down, and make an actual game!

All of which you mentioned, and maybe overall environment type effects (darker, more GOW type feel for dungeons, much lighter for morning etc).

I'm thinking more of an engine that is compiled then everything is entirely implemented on the outside, through scripts and whatnot.

So more of a script-based `modding` kind of environment, but not specific to a type of game?

Precisely.

Bmax2D+Streaming audio+streaming video+RTT+Textured Polys

What kind of video? Mpeg? AVI? Lossless?

How about a particle system, and if so, what features should it have?

avi.
I'd write my own.

If the particle system was provided?

Mine ;-p Suits me fine. Guess I'd like it to have some fancy 3D stuff in there though (sooon sooon)