Same, Same. But Different -- Comparing Game Engine Architectures using a Consensus Algorithm

The video game industry is one of the most innovative, competitive, and rapidly growing industries. The industry's successes along with the increasing gamers’ expectations result in always larger and more complex games. These games thus must be developed with game engines, which have become correspondingly more sophisticated. Today, game engine developers find game engine development challenging. To support the process of creating and maintaining game engines, we propose applying an approach based on a consensus algorithm to a set of game engine architectures. Our approach generates a model that suggests the most commonly used subsystems in game engine architectures, ranked by their degree of coupling. The model can be used by developers as a starting point when deciding what subsystems to include when building a game engine and points out the most coupled subsystems, which can play an important role towards higher subsystems maintainability and reusability. We evaluate our approach by comparing the results of our approach against a predefined ground truth data. The result of our approach matches the subsystems defined in the ground truth data and it shows that the most coupled subsystems are core, low-level rendering, third-party SDKs and world editor. Additionally, when comparing game engine architectures, we observe that most architectures are composed of nearly the same set of subsystems.