Hello, everybody. I'm really curious as to what game engine was used in the creation and development of Super Mario 64. I did some research on it and discovered that it was used also for Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, but I never got a name or any explanation about the engine itself, what it was written in, any examples, etc. Some guidance or explanations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks much in advance. :] Colton

I remember hearing that SM64 used a custom game engine developed by Nintendo itself. Its details are not public.

Based on my observations, the system is a fairly standard 3D platformer engine with some advanced features such as edge grappling. That said, they use some very novel techniques with the camera, so it almost always captures the action automatically in the game and tends to avoid obstructions between the player and his/her character very well while doing that.

The easiest way to implement such a system from scratch is to use a physics library like Havok or PhysX for collision detection and response, and coding the interaction logic on top of those. However, I would imagine that a ready engine exists that does most of this stuff.

On N64, the physics engine had to be very optimized with low collider complexity and tight space partitioning, since there wasn't an abundance of computing resources available.

Nik02, thanks a lot for your response. I understand most of what you were saying, but I don't know much about the technical details of game engines and their implementations yet. I'd like to code a game engine from scratch eventually to learn how to do it and what the pitfalls are and then use that knowledge with a more well-put-together third-party, open-source game engine like Ogre or Crystal Space or any of the other impressive ones available. Until then though I'm just doing my research to see what I can learn about game engines used in the past. :] I appreciate the information.