The 4A Engine is a graphics middleware engine developed by

4A Games 4A Games Limited is a Ukrainian-Maltese video game developer based in Sliema, Malta. The company was founded in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2006 by three developers who departed from GSC Game World. In 2014, 4A Games moved its headquarters to Sliema, whe ...

for use in their video game ''

Metro 2033 Metro 2033 may refer to: * ''Metro 2033'' (novel), a 2002 novel by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky * ''Metro 2033'' (video game), a 2010 first-person shooter video game based on the novel See also * ''Metro'' (franchise), originating from t ...

'', published by

THQ THQ Inc. was an American video game company based in Agoura Hills, California. It was founded in April 1990 by Jack Friedman, originally in Calabasas, and became a public company the following year through a reverse merger takeover. Initi ...

. It supports

Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware a ...

APIs 9, 10, 11, and recently 12,

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

3.2, along with

NVidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

's PhysX, and also NVidia's 3D Vision.

Development

The engine was developed in

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

by a set of people who split off from

GSC Game World GSC Game World is a Ukrainian video game developer based in Prague. Founded in Kyiv in 1995 by Sergiy Grygorovych, it is best known for the ''Cossacks'' and ''S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'' series of games. GSC Game World was the first company in Ukraine to ...

a year before the release of '' S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl'', notably Oles Shishkovtsov and Oleksandr Maksimchuk, the programmers who worked on the development of the

X-Ray An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30&nb ...

engine used in the ''S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'' video game series. The engine itself is capable of running on PC, the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation ...

, and the

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

. Shishkovtsov and his colleagues split from the development of ''S.T.A.L.K.E.R'' because that "its inherent inability to be multi-threaded, the weak and error-prone networking model, and simply awful resource and memory management which prohibited any kind of streaming or simply keeping the working set small enough for 'next-gen' consoles" along with its "terrible text-based scripting", which he explained led to the delays in the original game. The game is multi-threaded such that only

PhysX PhysX is an open-source realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by Nvidia as a part of Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting PhysX were meant to be accelerated by PhysX PPU (expansion cards designed by Ag ...

had a dedicated thread and uses a task-model without any pre-conditioning or pre/post-synchronising, allowing tasks to be done in parallel. When the Xbox 360 iteration had been measured during development, they were running it at "approximately 3,000 tasks per 30ms frame on Xbox 360 on CPU-intensive scenes with all hardware threads at 100 percent load". Shishkovtsov also said that the

GeForce 6 series The GeForce 6 series (codename NV40) is Nvidia's sixth generation of GeForce graphics processing unit, graphic processing units. Launched on April 14, 2004, the GeForce 6 family introduced Nvidia PureVideo, PureVideo post-processing for video, ...

architecture of the

RSX Reality Synthesizer The RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is a proprietary graphics processing unit (GPU) codeveloped by Nvidia and Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console. It is a GPU based on the Nvidia 7800GTX graphics processor and, according to Nvidia, is a G ...

in the PlayStation 3 proved to be very useful during development noted that there were many "wasted cycles". The engine can utilise a

deferred shading In the field of 3D computer graphics, deferred shading is a screen-space shading technique that is performed on a second rendering pass, after the vertex and pixel shaders are rendered. It was first suggested by Michael Deering in 1988. On ...

pipeline, and uses tesselation for greater performance, and also has HDR (complete with blue shift), real-time reflections, colour correction, film grain and noise, and the engine also supports multi-core rendering. The 4A Engine implementation of ''

'' features volumetric fog, double PhysX precision, object blur, sub-surface scattering for skin shaders,

parallax mapping Parallax mapping (also called offset mapping or virtual displacement mapping) is an enhancement of the bump mapping or normal mapping techniques applied to textures in 3D rendering applications such as video games. To the end user, this means tha ...

on all surfaces and greater geometric detail with a less aggressive LOD(s). Using

, the engine uses many features such as destructible environments, and cloth and water simulations, and particles that can be fully affected by environmental factors. The audio in the engine features 3D sound positioning, spatialisation and

attenuation In physics, attenuation (in some contexts, extinction) is the gradual loss of flux intensity through a medium. For instance, dark glasses attenuate sunlight, lead attenuates X-rays, and water and air attenuate both light and sound at variable att ...

Controversy

There have been accusations that the 4A Engine is a modified version of the X-Ray engine used in the ''S.T.A.L.K.E.R'' series, instead of an original development. 4A denied the accusations. Shishkovtsov also noted that porting the original engine to consoles would have proved extremely difficult.

Games using 4A Engine

* ''

'' (2010) * '' Metro: Last Light'' (2013) * '' Metro Redux'' (2014) * '' Arktika.1'' (2017) * ''

Metro Exodus ''Metro Exodus'' is a first-person shooter video game developed by 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. It is the third installment in the ''Metro'' video game trilogy based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels, following the events of ''Metro 203 ...

'' (2019)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:4a Engine 2010 software 3D graphics software Game engines for Linux Global illumination software Metro 2033 Proprietary software Video game engines