How are video games built?

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

So I developed an interest in how developers are able to put life inside the video game and create characters that can speak, talk and interact with other characters in the same space. So my question is do they use a graphics rendering library like opengl to build the video game universe or do they actually record real people with real cameras and then edit those footages and add them to the video game?

What I have tried:

I thought video games were purely built using open gl but turns out you can use a camera to record the real word and then generate some kind of video game space from that. Also Ubisoft hires a lot of people to voice the characters and they do record them while they play their scenes and add them to the video game.

Posted 9-Apr-23 1:16am

Tim the Gamer

Updated 9-Apr-23 3:04am

Add a Solution

2 solutions

Solution 2

Many games are built with game engines like Unity[^], popular with mobile games, or Unreal[^], which is popular with desktop and console. This YT video may help: I Made the Same Game in 8 Engines - YouTube[^]

Posted 9-Apr-23 3:04am

Graeme_Grant

Comments

Tim the Gamer 9-Apr-23 12:26pm

Hi, is unity5 software for windows that I need to download to design video games with?

Graeme_Grant 9-Apr-23 12:50pm

Watch this: #1 | LEARN UNITY AS AN ABSOLUTE BEGINNER! 🎮 | Getting Started With Unity | Learn Unity For Free - YouTube[^]

Tim the Gamer 9-Apr-23 12:54pm

Okay though a yes or a no would have cleared all reasonable doubts.

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

OriginalGriff · Accepted Answer · 2023-04-09T02:51:00

Solution 1

It's complicated: many games use motion capture to get realistic movements, and overlay that onto character models with appropriate skins applied. Others use "rag doll" physics where the various parts of the body are individually animated according to the forces applied to them. Very few games use "live actor" video footage outside cut scenes (and they tend to be pretty dull games anyway), but live voices is the norm.

I'd suggest that you start with a specific games forum rather than a general software development one, and the two worlds don't normally overlap as much as you might think! Take an example like GTA V: Development of Grand Theft Auto V - Wikipedia[^] around 1000 people worked on that game and a relatively small percentage were software developers writing code.

Posted 9-Apr-23 2:51am

OriginalGriff

Comments

Tim the Gamer 9-Apr-23 9:09am

"and a relatively small percentage were software developers writing code". Contrary to that I always thought that everything was done by the Software Developers, from programming how the characters look and listening to the keyboard or game input needs to make the character move, jump, leap or attack. If a very small numbers of developers are able to script all the thousands of properties that needs scripting in GTA 5 then I was wrong. I thought Rockstar employed tens of thousands of software developers.

OriginalGriff 9-Apr-23 10:38am

R* employ just under 5K people in total, but 5 years ago that was just 2K.
And GTA isn't the only game: not only is there the next one - GTA VI - while still supporting and building DLC for GTA V, but there is the Red Dead Redemption series, and loads of others over the years.

Would you trust a software dev to design characters? Do graphic design? invent the UI? Write storylines? Music? No, of course not - they are specialists, as are all the other employees. And I'm sure we've all seen what happens when you let most developers try to design a UI: it makes sense to them but not to the users ... :laugh:

Even way beck when Doom was being produced, there were only five people: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Tom Hall. But the final credits cover 15 people, only 4 of whom were software engineers: https://www.mobygames.com/game/1068/doom/credits/dos/

Tim the Gamer 9-Apr-23 10:48am

Those are guys that started doing this while they were kids, it takes a whole lot of experience to pull off something like that. Nowadays video games got a map, and the video game has a 3 dimension space where the player can move along all the axis like in the real world. The map is an object that is programmed, so is the lighting of the video game universe. My question is, these developers use high end hardware to test the software and then they publish a minimum system requirements documentation for their game based on the hardware combination that manages to run the frames for rendering all the graphics in the game within the least possible time, why this hype on the system requirements if the game is not all about the frames and the frame rendering capability? This made me think, developers do 80 percent of all the job including testing, porting to different platforms, writing the vertex and fragment shaders for all objects rendered , making sure the scenes are unlocked one after the other, locking certain sections of the game from the player and so on and so forth.