Game Engine

Software framework for building video games, combining rendering, physics, and animation, and often repurposed for simulation.

A game engine is a software framework built for developing video games, typically bundling modules for 3D rendering, a physics engine, animation, audio, scripting, and scene management; leading commercial products are Unity and Unreal Engine, with Godot as an open-source option. Because they can render realistic images in real time on consumer graphics cards and make scene editing easy, they're also used for architectural visualization, training simulations, and research. Many embodied-AI simulation platforms are built directly on game engines, gaining realistic visuals and a rich ecosystem of assets and tools; the downside is that game physics is tuned to look plausible rather than to be precise, commonly connecting joints with Cartesian coordinates plus numerical constraints, which can let joint constraints break down in complex structures. That's why fine-grained manipulation and motion-control research more often uses robotics-focused simulators such as MuJoCo and Isaac Sim.

ExampleThe self-driving simulator CARLA is built on Unreal Engine (upgraded to UE 5.5 starting with version 0.10.0), while the household embodied environment AI2-THOR is built on Unity.

Also called

Unity, Unreal Engine

Related

Simulator · Physics Engine · Rendering · Photorealistic Rendering · CARLA · AI2-THOR

Sources

Game engine - Wikipedia
CARLA Simulator
AI2-THOR

As of

2026-09