First-person shooter engine

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Please improve this article if you can. (June 2007)
A diagram showing the history of FPS engines
A diagram showing the history of FPS engines

A first-person shooter engine simulates a 3D graphics environment for use in a first-person shooter computer or video game. First-person refers to the view where the player sees the world from the eyes of their character. Shooter refers to games which revolve primarily around killing other entities in the game world, usually NPC characters or other players.

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Widely varying requirements and characteristics, but with game rendering point intended to be from the first-person perspective and with the need to shoot things mostly made up using Vector graphics engines.

Planar worlds (rectangular grid in Wolfenstein 3D, sector-based plane levels in Doom) with sprite objects. Average Video Hardware requirements: CPU-powered software rendering. The Build engine used sprites for many things, but had arbitrary 3D-level geometry.

For the first time, game engines recreated true 3D worlds with arbitrary level geometry. Instead of sprites the engines used simply textured (single-pass texturing, no lighting details) polygon objects (Quake used fewer animated sprites, following the trend to 3D rather than 2D game objects). Average Video Hardware requirements: first 3D-accelerators (Voodoo, Voodoo 2, later more powerful 3D video cards such as nVidia Riva TNT). Quake II was one of the first games that used hardware accelerated graphics. An especially big milestone in first person shooter engines was the Unreal Engine, which has been used in a big number of FPS games since its release.

New graphics hardware provided new capabilities, allowing new engines to add various new effects, such as particle effects, fog, coloured lighting, as well as increase texture and polygon detail. Many games featured large outdoor environments, vehicles, rag-doll physics. Average Video Hardware requirements: GeForce 2, GeForce 3, Radeon 8500 (or similar).

The maps may feature seamlessly integrated indoor/outdoor environments. Some, or all of the pixel shader-based textures, bump mapping, vertex shaders used for animations, lighting and shadowing technologies are common. Shader technologies include HLSL, Cg, and GLSL. Average Video Hardware requirements: GeForce 4, GeForce FX, Radeon 9xxx (or other cards with Pixel shader 2.x support).

Developers of this era of 3D engines often tout their increasingly photorealistic quality.

Berserker from Unreal 3 technology demo - a detailed model, bump-mapping, and real-time soft self-shadowing
Berserker from Unreal 3 technology demo - a detailed model, bump-mapping, and real-time soft self-shadowing

The first games using Unreal Engine 3 were released in November 2006, and the first games to use CryENGINE 2 were released in 2007. These games will include realistic shader-based materials with predefined physics, environments with procedural and vertex shader-based objects (vegetation, debris, human-made objects such as books or tools), procedural animation, cinematographic effects (depth of field, motion blur, etc.), and unified lighting models with soft shadowing. Average Video Hardware requirements: GeForce 7 and Radeon X1xxx (for Shader Model 3 games), Geforce 8 and Radeon HD 2xxx (for Shader Model 4 games).

Another interesting prospective is the Sauerbraten FPS game and engine. Although it is still in early development (as a continuation of Cube), the simple engine framework and in-game map editing make the game stand out. Also, the popular open source engine OGRE 3D is another candidate.

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