Messiah Engine

Messiah Engine is an in-house game engine developed by NetEase. It supports multiple platforms including iOS, Android, and PC, with a focus on mobile games.

History

Development of Messiah Engine began in 2007.^[1] It was first introduced in 2010, with its first game released in 2013.^[2] Zhao Yukun, head of the engine's development, said he was inspired by Edwin Catmull, who developed the Stochastic Sampling algorithm initially used by Pixar RenderMan.^[1] The first demo was shown to NetEase founder Ding Lei on an iPad mini 2.^[1] The engine now supports multiple platforms: iOS, macOS, Android, PC, PS4/PS5, Switch, and Xbox.^[1] NetEase demonstrated the engine at E3 2016 along with its game Tianxia.^[3][4] It has received more than 20 patents.^[5]

As of July 2021, the engine has been used to develop 9 games, including Diablo Immortal and Where Winds Meet,^[6][7] as well as many mobile games such as Knives Out, Eternal Arena, A Dream of Jianghu, The Legend of Glory, and Ace Racer.^[1][8][2]

Features

A major focus of Messiah Engine is efficiently taking advantage of multiple processors.^[9] Besides general rendering, physics, and UI threads, Messiah Engine attempts to break down jobs even further into "execution slices," with a queue to manage task dependencies.^[9] To support multiple platforms, Messiah Engine uses a hardware abstraction layer composed of three layers: algorithm, translation, and device driver.^[9]

The engine supports physically based rendering and real time global illumination.^[5][1]

References