glow_trance

0 comments by glow_trance on Sep 10th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

Using the UNREAL Engine

I never really thought too much on the history of the world until about a year ago or so when a co-worker/friend really started to ask me about it. Questions that called for more than a vague response and understanding; and for each question posed, I became more and more curious myself, with a burning desire to understand. 

 Most of the people who identify themselves as Christians, when asked if it’s seven days of creation or billions of years of evolution, don’t have clearly defined answers. We are presented with what we are told is airtight scientific fact; we are shown in recreated fakeumentaries what life was like for dinosaurs millions of years ago. It all comes as very convincing when the alternative most have is a very generalized understanding and straw man rendition of the creation account in Genesis. It was around the time I really began to wonder the methods of a Genesis account creation that I began to design games. And after much studying of geographies, histories, and biology; combined with getting into the Unreal 3 engine, I feel I have a very well rounded view of what happened.

When working in Unreal, designing a world of your own and relaying the process back to Genesis, it is easy to see that we are living life in God’s game engine. This is a brief look at how the first four days of Creation can easily relate to game design. Genesis 1 1-19. 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  

Upon first opening the engine, you are in the middle of a dark emptiness. Just as God’s first step in creating our world began, so does ours in creating another world. 

 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 


 Next, to create your level, you carve out your BSP geometry and, so you can see what you’re doing, you make light by toggling between Lit and Unlit modes. Day One, and day is defined by God.  One argument common is that these days are not actual days. Or they’re “God days”, not days as we know them. However, day four provides…the cosmos, if you will. We define a day as the amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate its axis…it takes roughly a month for the moon to orbit the Earth and one year for the Earth to orbit the sun. We are in a giant clock, designed by God, He set the time scheme. Would He change the definition of what a “day” is halfway through His creation?  

Say you’re in a band. Your band has been practicing this song for the past few weeks and you’re about to get some studio time to record it. You’re in the studio recording and halfway through the song, you all start playing different songs…that’s the amount of sense it makes. We can only conclude it is a literal day. 

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and morning were the second day.

 God separates the water from each other, above and below the firmament. In the creation, there are three degrees of firmament, or Heaven. There is the space that is the sky, there is the space we know as outer space, and there is the Heaven space which is the Kingdom of Christ.
This is not entirely unlike the situation of your world you’re creating using the game engine. The character of your game “lives” in the realm you created for him/her to. The space from which the player knows to the end of the world BSP is their sky firmament. Outside of that, a vacuum of virtual space, dark, empty, much like our outer space. Then you have everything outside of the game and engine…you have our world, other virtual worlds, things and places the character confined to your game world you made for him/her, if capable of thought, could never imagine.

This separation of water above the sky essentially put the earth in a bubble, creating a gigantic hyperbaric chamber.  This, combined with a vegetarian diet rich in antioxidants and a virtually disease free environment would allow for organisms to have very long life spans.

 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.  

When land was first created, it was in one place. There were not broken continents and islands as we see them today. The earth was one land mass, Pangaea. And vegetation was created, grown by the light of God on day 3. 

 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.  

Up until this point in building your game, you have just been using the worker lights to get around in you level, but now, it’s time to add real lighting so that when we do a build and run it, the lights will affect and interact with the game play. Ok, so why is the moon referred to as a light here? We clearly know that the moon isn’t the actual source of the light, the sun is. Well, the Bible says that it “gives” light. From our perspective, the moon provides us with light it reflects from the sun…indirect lighting. 

And from this point, days 5, 6 and 7; we will begin to set programming values and rules so that the environment responds to the player’s actions and we’ll add some characters…but that is for another time.  Once a game is launched and live, the developer can add new content, updates, patches; the same goes for God interacting with His creation here.  Just as a game designer creatively intergrades added features and content to blend into the existing game and for most cases, obey the laws of order and physics that have already been applied to objects and areas, so does God. And of course, He has a God Mode too. 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. If you accept this, you realize there is nothing in the Bible that is impossible. Prost