Essential Game Engines: BigWorld

Creator: Bigworld Technology
Platforms: Browser, PC, xbox 360, ps3, ios
Games: World of Tanks, Copernicus (upcoming), Tian Xia II
www.bigworldtech.com

BigWorld is a middleware platform that specialises in massively multiplayer and online games development, with core components of the product including server, client, plug-ins, supports and tools such as particle, model and world editors.

Built to help with the development of PC and browser games, as well as being available on iOS, Xbox 360 and PS3 via network API, the engine has been used to create games such as Wargaming.net’s World of Tanks and Chinese MMO’s Tian Xia II and Kingdom Heroes 2 Online.

BigWorld Server also offers a solution to enabling games to scale rapidly to support hundreds of thousands of players.

Bigworld social media director Matt Daly says that with the rapid expansion of the games industry’s collective target market, there are many more people playing games simultaneously.

“One of the biggest-font items on BigWorld’s roadmap is interoperability between BigWorld Server and the new platforms that are going to make it increasingly possible to bring more users simultaneously into an experience, re-defining the concept of ‘massive’ in gaming,” he says.

With so many developers now also creating games on their own or in small teams, the engine vendor last year released the Indie Edition of its platform to tap into the emerging market.

Daly says this has received strong interest and adoption from the indie development community, with the company keen to support devs wherever the market is headed.

“BigWorld’s roadmap tends to be composed partially of what current and future clients will need. Increasing focus is being put on mobile and browser,” he states.

“Thankfully, BigWorld Server is quite extensible and can be piped in relatively easily into any front-end. This has allowed BigWorld to be fairly agile with its client development roadmap.“