DM Topics Week 2: Game Engines

This week I played Civilization 5, which runs on the Fraxis Lore game engine. As stated in Game Cultures “[t]he ‘render’ engine controls the game’s visual representation, generating polygons, skins, landscapes and objects as the game is played” (Dovey & Kennedy, 57), so the team behind Civilization 5 wanted to make a game with stunning graphics for its users that play for hours on end. The game’s engine was natively developed for Windows’ Direct X 3D 11 (D3D11), a 3D graphics API, which the majority of their players used. At the time of development D3D11 was still in Alpha, however the team behind Civilization wanted the game to remain playable and performant for players to continue using the game long after its release. It is because of this, this 3rd person strategy game has received praise for its gameplay and improvements.

The community also has a strong history of modifying the game to suit their desires. The primary function of Civilization games is to secure a victory above all by developing your culture, science, faith, foreign relations, production, and expanding your territory. This has lead to players modifying the game to customize the game, such as enhancing the UI, adding new using, and even adding new features to the game like visualizing the global relations and historical data of interactions between AI and the player. Some modifications change the map and units to look inline with media properties Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Dark Souls, the Witcher, and many others. This engine’s customizability is attributed to the code being available with its source files downloaded on a user’s PC. This gives players much more control to reuse the game engine and share their mods publicly, usually for free. It’s these facts of the game’s community and the prevalence of customization of Civ 5 makes it reusable and extensible.