Mmmmmmmm Additives...

A game engine is a software system designed for video games to aid creation and development. They usually include a rendering engine, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, and a scene graph. The game engines are important in gaming and are often reused for other games.

Additive and subtractive refers to how the world of games is created.

Additive environments begins with nothing, which is called a void. The designer then starts to place items into it. The Quake engines (Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena) and The Half-Life engine (Half-Life) use additive environments

Subtractive environments are opposite to additive environments. There is no void in a subtractive environment. The world starts with an infinite solid which designers must subtract from to create spaces for a user. The Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex) and The Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2) use subtractive environment.

Some companies specialise in “Middleware”. This is software that includes elements a game developer may need for a game. Gamebryo and RenderWare are some of the more known Middleware programs

Since there is such a high demand for amazing quality in next generation consoles it’s hard to keep up with the hype. Also game engine has to do much more then what it originally had to do to keep up with demand.