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GrimE (Grim Engine) is an adventure game engine, created by Bret Mogilefsky at LucasArts using the free software scripting language Lua. It was first used for Grim Fandango.
Partly based on the Sith engine, GrimE was the successor to SCUMM, preserving some of that engine's features. Like SCUMM it is based around characters and objects which interact with each other, on top of pre-rendered backgrounds. The major difference between GrimE and SCUMM is that the engine which deals with character rendering and movement in GrimE is a true 3D engine; characters are collections of 3D-rendered polygons and movement is controlled in full 3D by the keyboard. There are other, less obvious differences; the way actions are scripted, for example, is completely different, and allows for much more sophisticated movements and actions by non-player characters.
After Grim Fandango, a slightly improved GrimE engine was used in Escape from Monkey Island, the fourth game in the Monkey Island series. So far, these are the only 2 games to use the GrimE engine.
A subproject of ScummVM, called Residual, is developing a free implementation of the GrimE engine by reverse engineering the original.
GrimE's and SCUMM's names are similar in that they both come from synonyms for dirt (grime and scum).
