Best Free Windows Game Engines

A game engine is a software development environment designed for people to build video games. Developers use them to create games for personal computers, consoles, and mobile devices.

Developers who want to accelerate game development benefit enormously from tools known as game engines. This type of software application helps games to be coded efficiently and easily without compromising on its quality. They do require programming knowledge, as they’re highly customizable and the possibilities are only limited by the developer’s imagination. However, they offer huge time savings with many preset modules, libraries, effects, and tools so that you don’t have to create everything from scratch.

Game engines employ state-of-the-art technology to ensure that developers can concentrate on generating new scenery, models, and sounds, or to put an alternative spin on existing game material.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of high quality game engines that run in Windows. They are all cross-platform game engines.

This article focuses on advanced game engines and doesn’t include simple drag and drop game making tools or any other game development tools (graphics, audio, etc.).

Game Engines
Xenko	C# game engine designed for the future of gaming
Doomsday Engine	Source port with support for Doom, Heretic, and Hexen
GemRB	Clone of BioWare's Infinity Engine
O.H.R.RPG.C.E	Editor for creating your own Role Playing Games
Panda3D	Originally developed and actively maintained by the Walt Disney VR Studio
FIFE	Flexible Isometric Free Engine
Annchienta	Single-player graphical 2D tile-based game engine
Cocos2d-x	Game framework written in C++
Godot	2D and 3D cross-platform compatible game engine
MonoGame	Fully managed .NET open source game framework without any black boxes
Castle Game Engine	Oriented towards working with VRML models.
Urho3D	Cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine implemented in C++
DarkPlaces	Quake modification
Spring	Real-time strategy game engine
Cafu	3D graphics engine and game development kit
Delta3D	Fully-featured game engine
Irrlicht Engine	3D engine for creating real-time 3D applications
T-Engine4	Roguelike game engine operating in Lua

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Are there any other good free open source game engines that run under Windows? Share your comments below.