Essence Engine is a game engine developed by

Relic Entertainment Relic Entertainment Inc. (formerly known as THQ Canada Inc.) is a Canadian video game developer based in Vancouver, founded in 1997. The studio specializes in real-time strategy games and is known for series such as ''Homeworld'', '' Warhammer 40 ...

for the video game ''

Company of Heroes ''Company of Heroes'' is a real-time strategy video game series developed by Relic Entertainment. The series is set during World War II. Games ''Company of Heroes'' The first game in the series was released on September 12, 2006 in North ...

''.

Features

The Essence Engine featured many new graphical effects at the time it was introduced, including high-dynamic-range lighting,

dynamic lighting Computer graphics lighting is the collection of techniques used to simulate light in computer graphics scenes. While lighting techniques offer flexibility in the level of detail and functionality available, they also operate at different levels of ...

and shadows, advanced shader effects and

normal mapping In 3D computer graphics, normal mapping, or Dot3 bump mapping, is a texture mapping technique used for faking the lighting of bumps and dents – an implementation of bump mapping. It is used to add details without using more polygons. A common ...

. The Essence Engine is also one of the first RTS engines to create detailed faces with facial animations. In '' Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts'', the Essence Engine was further improved to include weather effects, and also added support for

DirectX 10 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

on Windows Vista. ''

Dawn of War II ''Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II'' is a real-time strategy- tactical role-playing video game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ for Microsoft Windows based on the fictional ''Warhammer 40,000'' universe. It is the sequel to t ...

'' uses an updated version of Essence Engine (Essence 2.0) which allows for more detailed models and textures; more advanced lighting and shading effects; more complex "sync-kills" than those in ''Dawn of War''; and better support for multi-processor systems. ''

Company of Heroes 2 ''Company of Heroes 2'' is a real-time strategy video game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by Sega for Windows, Linux, and OS X. It is the sequel to the 2006 game '' Company of Heroes''. As with the original ''Company of Heroes'', ...

'' is the first game to feature the 3rd generation of the Essence Engine (Essence 3.0) which features

DirectX 11 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

support. Improvement to the engine featured in the game include the new line-of-sight technology, TrueSight, which aims to better emulate troop visibility in real combat. In contrast to traditional unit visibility, TrueSight more accurately represents a unit's visibility range based on environmental conditions and type of unit. Essence 3.0 also incorporates a weather-simulating technology known as ColdTech which allows for realistic obstacles and destructible environments.

Games using the engine

References

2006 software Relic Entertainment Video game engines {{Videogame-software-stub