In the context of video games, middleware is software that a game developer can add on to their game for certain features. Middleware developers help other developers by not having them "re-invent the wheel". Middleware can either come from a third party company, or developed in-house. Contrast to a complete game engine, which may comprise of almost everything in the game, or just the core components.
Middleware solutions can also be used to help ease software porting- if a software uses the middleware exclusively, and the middleware can support the new target platform, then porting the software to the new target platform would be as straightforward as a recompile and just some optimization tuning as opposed to a complete rewrite.
See also Application Programming Interface, of which Middlewares are a superset.
Examples of Middleware:
- Physics
- Havok
- PhysX (ex- Novodex, from NVIDIA)
- Eurphoria
- Bullet
- ODE (used in Call of Juarez)
- Newton Game Dynamics
- Tokamak
- Audio (and supported formats)
- Miles Sound System (.mp3, ogg, .wav, .bik): One of the most highly used audio middleware, as the developers claim over 7200 games on 18 systems.
- Criware ADX (.aax, .adx, .aix): Used as an alternative to MP3 and is popular with Eastern developers.
- Fraunhoffer IIS MP3 (.mp3): Likely first used by Rare in the Nintendo 64's heyday. This used to require a license to use, but the patent expired in the mid 2010s opening it up to widespread use.
- Xiph Ogg Vorbis (.ogg), Speex (.spx - deprecated), Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac), CELT (merged into Opus) and Opus (.opus). Ogg Vorbis is one of the most popular audio codecs for use in video game development since early 2000s, due to it's free and patent-free nature and as an alternative to MP3 due to its superior, more transparent quality at small file size, especially in the indie gaming scene.
- Quicktime: Popular in the early 90s.
- AAC (.aac): The audio component of MPEG-4. Used alongside H.264 mostly by Eastern developers who use H.264, again due to backing from Sony and Microsoft, and that the process flow can be adapted from existing QuickTime ones.
- Wwise (.wem): Another popular, yet highly-advanced audio middleware with more advanced spatial audio pipeline and flexible interactive music solutions. Vorbis, Opus, PCM and ADPCM are used and formatted in WEM (Wwise Encoded Media), but the middleware never directly plays WEM files and instead uses BNK and XML files to indirectly play such audio files.
- FMOD (.fsb): Handles audio playback, also popular with indie game development scene.
- Video
- Bink/Smacker (.bik/.smk): Used by many, many games, popular for Western developers. Smacker was the older video codec, Bink being the newer one and is still widely used.
- Sofdec (.sfd): Used as an alternative to Bink, popular with Eastern developers.
- Xiph Theora (.ogv)
- Quicktime: Popular in the early 90s before Smacker.
- H.264: aka MPEG-4 (.mp4). Second in popularity among Eastern developers around the early new tens, mostly due to the amount of backing given by Sony and Microsoft, and that the process flow can be adapted from those already using QuickTime since the MPEG-4 container format itself is derived from QuickTime.
- Other
