The 4A Engine is a graphics middleware engine developed by 4A Games for use in their video game '' Metro 2033'', published by THQ. 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 ...

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 ha ...

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 invas ...

by a set of people who split off from GSC Game World 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 X-rays (or rarely, ''X-radiation'') are a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. In many languages, it is referred to as Röntgen radiation, after the German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered it in 1895 and named it ' ...

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 generati ...

, 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 ...

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 A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

-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 graphic processing units. Launched on April 14, 2004, the GeForce 6 family introduced PureVideo post-processing for video, '' SLI'' technology, and ''Shader Model 3.0 ...

architecture of the RSX Reality Synthesizer 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 '' Metro 2033'' features volumetric fog, double PhysX precision, object blur,

sub-surface scattering Subsurface scattering (SSS), also known as subsurface light transport (SSLT), is a mechanism of light transport in which light that penetrates the surface of a translucent object is scattering, scattered by interacting with the Material (comput ...

for skin shaders, parallax mapping on all surfaces and greater geometric detail with a less aggressive

LOD Lod ( he, לוד, or fully vocalized ; ar, اللد, al-Lidd or ), also known as Lydda ( grc, Λύδδα), is a city southeast of Tel Aviv and northwest of Jerusalem in the Central District of Israel. It is situated between the lower Shephe ...

(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 ...

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

* '' Metro 2033'' (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