The Machinery by Our Machinery is an in development professional game engine that just entered open beta. We went hands-on with The Machinery earlier in the year when it was still in closed beta if you want an in-depth but slightly out of date hands-on experience. With the move to open beta all you need to do is register an account and download the engine to get started.
In a world dominated with game engines, what makes The Machinery unique? This engine is being developed by members behind the Stingray/BitSquid engines, used in such titles as Magicka and Warhammer Vermintide. The engine is light weight, modular and written in the C language with a focus on customizibility. Details from the open beta announcement:
If you are still wondering what The Machinery is, it’s a new lightweight and flexible game engine, designed to give you all the power of a modern engine in a minimalistic package that is easy to understand, extend, explore, rewrite, and hack. Beyond games, the API can also be used for simulations and visualizations as well as building custom tools, editors, and applications.
Some of the things that make The Machinery more hackable than other game engines are:
- The Machinery’s API is written in C. It’s easy to understand without learning the complexities of modern C++. And don’t worry, you still have type-safe vectors and hash tables, just as in C++.
- We use a modular design that is completely plugin-based. This makes it easy to extend and replace parts of the engine.
- The engine can be stripped down to a minimalistic core. Don’t need physics, animation, or sound? Just ship the engine without those DLLs.
- Individual DLLs can be hot-reloaded. You can modify gameplay, UI, etc, while the editor is running.
- The codebase is small, readable and well documented.
- We offer licenses with full source code for both small and large developers.
You can learn more about The Machinery open beta and a quick hands-on/getting started guide in the video below.