Genome Engine is a game engine created by the German game developer Piranha Bytes. It has been used in Gothic 3, Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods, Risen series and also in Elex game. The engine was released in 2006.

History[edit]

Three students of the university in Oldenburg - Ulf Wohlers, Dieter Hildebrandt and Bert Speckels designed their own game engine called Finster. They created studio, which was called "Mad Scientists Entertaiment". They needed help of professional studio and that is why they sent demo of their game to Greenwood Entertainment. In August 1996 both studioes signed the contract to create a game together. On 12 October 1997 Alex Brüggemann, Stefan Nyul, Tom Putzki and Michael Hoge from Greenwood Entertainment set up the Piranha Bytes. They licensed the engine of Mad Scientists Entertaiment to realize their vision of a roleplaying game. The engine got the name "Zengine". In 1998 Bert Speckels offered to change the name of the game to "Gothic". The game is released on 15 March 2001. Piranha Bytes created four games based on ZenGine: Gothic, Gothic II, Gothic II: Night of the Raven ( expansion pack of the game Gothic II) and also Gothic Sequel (but this project has been abandoned). The ZenGin could create open world without loading screens. The engine allowed day and night cycle and dynamic changing weather. The program used DirectX 7 and later DirectX 8 . Then Gothic 2 was released, part of the Piranha Bytes started working on expansion pack which has been called Night of the Raven. The main team began the development of Gothic 3. They wanted to create the world three times bigger than in Gothic 2. The ZenGine was not able to render the world as big as the makers wished. They needed a new engine. Inspiration to create new engine was Gamebryo, that had been used by Bethesda for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The new engine coded by Piranha Bytes was called Genome Engine. The studio used many middlewares, like Ageia's PhysX physics engine for physic simulation, Bink Video Techonology for video cutscenes, Emotion FX2 for animations and facial animations, Miles Sound System for sound and Speedtree for vegetation. In Risen 3 Piranha Bytes added physics for cloth, objects and wet looking surfaces at rain. The engine has been improved while working with Risen series and ELEX. While working on the ELEX game, the graphics made a huge jump. The makers used DirectX 11 for the first time. They also improved render and added global illumination.

Features[edit]

Nowadays engine supports Unified Volumetric Lighting, Line-Sweep Ambient Occlusion, Volumetric Clouds, flowmap-based water for all water surfaces, global illumination and also Far Field Ambient Occlusion( Horizontal Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO) and Line-Sweep Ambient Obscurance (LSAO)). Genome Engine is compatible with DirectX 11. The current release is Genome Engine, designed for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Games using Genome Engine:[edit]

Gothic 3 (2006)
Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods (2008)
Risen (2009)
Risen 2: Dark Waters (2012)
Risen 3: Titan Lords (2014)
Risen 3: Titan Lords - Enhanced Edition (2015)
ELEX (2017)

References[edit]

https://www.worldofelex.de/en/game/the-engine

http://www.makinggames.biz/blog/programming/genome-evolution-engine-behind-elex,2307634.html

https://www.moddb.com/engines/genome

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