Trinigy
German middleware company Trinigy may not be a household name when it comes to game technology, but over the years it has steadily built up its presence from its central European heartland to pick up clients in Asia, the U.K. and the U.S.
The engine features advanced lighting and shadowing features, with particular attention recently being paid to stream processing and multi-threading.
Other components include integrated physics, animation, particle effects and audio. The next major release of the Vision Engine (version 7) will see significant improvement in areas such as visibility and occlusion processing, instance scripting and support for third-party tools.
In term of game development, the Vision Engine links into the vForge editing framework -- something that's designed to be extended and customized using the C# programming language so gameplay features can be exposed for artists and level editors.
An important part of the system is the vLux light-mapping tool that enables you to pre-process and bake static lighting information into your textures.
Interactive shader editing, the addition of dynamic effects, volumetric effects and camera paths can be carried out within vForge too, while future releases of the tech will include enhancements between the art pipeline and tools such as 3ds Max and Maya.
Vision Engine
Features: HDR renderer supporting radiosity-based, normal-mapped illumination; integrated physics, particle, animation, cinematic playback and audio components, vForce development environment including vLux light mapping tool
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (Wii in development)
Integration with Other Technologies: Bullet Physics, FMOD, Kynapse, ODE Physics, PhysX, ProFX, ScaleForm and SpeedTree, plus plug-ins for 3ds Max and Maya
Cost: per-title/per-platform fee without royalties. Details available on request
Released Games Include: Alarm for Cobra 11 (Exozet), Back to Gaya (4Head), Helldorado (Spellbound), The Show (16Tons), Undercover (Sproing)
Games in Development Include: Dungeon Hero (Firefly), Gothic 4 (Spellbound), Warlord (Neowiz)
www.trinigy.net
Spellbound's Airline Tycoon 2
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On a related note, I'm pleased to find that there's more support for Linux than I previously thought. I'll have to look at a couple of them closer.
> It's safe to say Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is the current,
> de facto industry standard middleware
It's safe to say that it's currently the most popular 3rd party engine for AAA current-gen titles. That's not really the same thing as being a de facto industry standard. You wouldn't say the Ford Focus is the de facto standard for UK cars, just because it has the largest market share. By definition a de facto standard has to be so completely ubiquitous that anything other than it seems odd - that's not Unreal 3's status.
Like: Unity, Unigine, StemCell, NeoAxis, Quest3D.
And much more, there are Game Engines very good and the prices is more low.
Shouldn't this article be called "List of expensive commercial engines" ?
Why not the Nebula engine?
Or ... well.... the list is long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
Game engines have come a long way in the last few years and the commercial engines that had the market to themselves need to realise that they face competition and need to restructure thier licensing. the engine with the best tools and licensing will make a lot of money.