The gaming stack: from engines to cloud gaming
The gaming stack: from engines to cloud gaming The gaming stack is the long path from writing code to delivering a smooth experience on a player’s screen. It includes game engines, art pipelines, platform tools, networks, and a growing layer of cloud services. For teams of any size, understanding how these pieces fit helps you plan, optimize, and reach more players. From engines to runtimes Game engines supply rendering, physics, and scripting, and they set the core rules of the game. Asset and build pipelines manage art, audio, and compression to run well on target devices. Middleware and services add networking, analytics, and online features without starting from scratch. Runtime on devices and on servers shapes performance and how responsive the game feels to players. Cloud gaming basics Cloud gaming shifts the heavy work to remote servers. The client streams video and audio, while the server renders, encodes, and sends frames back. This can lower the bar for device variety, but it makes latency, bandwidth, and compression crucial. Edge computing and smart caching help reduce delay, while adaptive streaming keeps the image stable under changing network conditions. ...