Components of game engines

Graphic rendering

Anti-aliasing

• Anti-Aliasing is the process of smoothing jagged lines 
• It simply doesn't make images look pixelated  
• This makes games look better although it negatively effect game performance

LOD Model

• LOD or Level of detail 
• Involves decreasing the complexity of a 3D object as it gets further away
• Also increasing the complexity the closer you are to that object

Lighting Effects

• Lighting effects are how an area is lit up
• depending on the position of light sources
• Also how an object blocking the light, creates a shadow

Shaders

• Shaders are used in video games to produce an infinite range of effects 
• Shaders can be used to alter saturation, brightness and/or contrast of an image
• Its also the tool that is used to apply affects to an image

View frustum

• The view frustum is the field of view of a camera
• Everything that the player isn't seeing, isn't in the view frustum
• It also deletes objects from the game if they aren't in the players view

Animation Systems

Path-based

• Is when a entity cannot move from a given path. It is basically moving in a straight line and wont stop or go off of its track.
• Example of this would be the Gran Turismo games, the AI in these games stays on a pre determined line and doesnt move from it.

Particle systems

• A piece of animation used to simulate non solid objects
• Such as water, fire, gases and dust etc.

Systems

Sound

• Sound is an important aspect for video games
• Without sound a video game would be silent and just visuals
• Sound in video games are either foley sound (Using nomal objects to create sound) or sounds created with software such as audacity or FL Studio.

NETWORKING
Is when you play with other people online using the internet. There are two types of online gaming, competitive and casual. Many games are mostly developed for online play. e.g. First person shooters. Some video games, when playing multiplayer use a cloud based system so everyone is connected to the same server. Whilst others can use the player in a "lobby" who has the strongest internet connection and would connect via that player.

Artificial Intelligence

AI AGENTS
AI is a non playable character in a game, that can act like a player or be used as a target/enemy for the player
AI is controlled by a piece of code in the game, that will tell the model where/when it should move, attack or what it should ultimately do.The game pictured is the Nazi Zombies game mode from Call of Duty: World at War/Black ops. The way it uses AI is that the zombies will attack the player throughout the whole game, they also always walk towards the player(s)

Pathfinding

• Is the process of a computer trying to find the shortest path to a point
• Its also about how a entity finds a path around an object
• This is most frequantly used in real-time strategy games

neural nets and fuzzy logic

• Is the combination of artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic
• ANN is the process of a machine learning
• Fuzzy logic is the process of a machine reasoning

Middleware

Middleware

• Is a piece of software that is made for a specific task
• An example is the whole of Pandora in avatar That was all made using SpeedTree
• This would be helpful if a game were to for example have to create a whole forest in it. It would help with the time it would create to make your own forest in engine.