Phyre Starter

For the past few weeks, I've been working extensively with Sony Computer Entertainment's Phyre Engine. This is the same engine that powers Namco Bandai's Dark Souls, as well as thatgamecompany's Journey among many others.

So far, I can't complain. The engine is free to use, gives the developer source level access and supports multiple platforms (PS3,  PS4, Vita, PC). To top it all off, it sports a very powerful editor tool with full scripting functionality. The editor is completely optional, and if you so choose you can ignore all additional features and use Phyre as a simple rendering engine.

The editor is very easy to use, with the standard array of property sheets, script editors, and object hierarchies you would come to expect from a tool like Unity or UDK. Game logic can be written in scripts through the editor, or implemented through C++ code at the source level.

The code above is the heart of your typical Phyre application header. The virtual functions marked "Phyre Framework overrides" encapsulate all of the top level functions of your game application (namely things like initialization, input handling, updating and drawing). The functions below the "PIEditEventHandler Implementation" comment can be called directly by the scripts attached to game components constructed in the Phyre Level Editor.

Speaking of which, Phyre follows a component-based model. This means that the game entities you construct in the editor are built up of multiple components. These components could be anything from your art assets (animations, textures etc) to character controllers, triggers etc. Below is a list of the components that make up the little girl shown in the screen shot above.

Not only is this an elegant way to organize data in our editor (good for us humans), but this is also very efficient for our game at run-time. By storing our data components in common sets, as opposed to an object oriented approach, we can reduce cache latency and thus lose fewer CPU cycles. That way we can use valuable time for things that matter (gameplay, graphics, gibs).

With it's wide variety of features and tools, as well as easy portability to multiple platforms it's a wonder that more people are not using this engine. My team and I are very excited to make our next game using this tool, and are looking forward to seeing what we can produce.