Comment by jheriko

Comment by jheriko 11 days ago

Good. This is exactly what I've been complaining about for decades now...

I also have my own engine although it needs some refurbishment. I've never quite found the time to polish it to a point where it can be sold. It also runs on tiny old devices, although if you limit yourself to desktop hardware, that means anything from the last 30 years or so. It also has a design that allows it to load enormous (i.e. universe scale) data by streaming with most often an unperceptable loading time... on the iPhone 4 in about 200ms you are in an interactive state which could be "in game".

Unity and Unreal are top-tier garbage that don't deserve our money and time. The bigger practical reason to use them is that people have experience and the plugin and extension ecosystems are rich and filled with battle tested and useful stuff.

bespoke big company engines are often terrible too. Starfield contains less real world data than my universe app, but somehow looks uglier and needs a modern PC to run at all. mine runs on an iPhone 4, looks nicer and puts you in the world in the first 200ms... you might think its not comparable but it absolutely is, all of the same techniques could be applied to get exactly the same quality of result with all their stacks and stacks of art and custom data - and they could have a richer bunch of real world data to go with it!

999900000999 11 days ago

>Unity and Unreal are top-tier garbage that don't deserve our money and time. The bigger practical reason to use them is that people have experience and the plugin and extension ecosystems are rich and filled with battle tested and useful stuff.

Both are effectively magical sandboxes where platform support is someone else's problem.

Unity is still pretty great, but it's chained to a company that has no real business plan to sustainability.

Unreal is okay, but developers aren't using it right. For any bigger project you should customized the engine for your needs. Or at the very least spend some time to optimize.

But we need to ship and we need to ship now.

Blame the developers not the tools.

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jheriko 10 days ago

i've been doing this for decades and my bedroom work had never done anything but put unreal and unity to shame. from top to bottom i can not understand the ignorance of their design from a simple "a programmer is making this" standpoint, it comes from a legacy of "a rookie wannabe with too much money had a good shot and too much promotion"
unreal is fucking awful, its a masterclass in how to not make:
* components
* hierarchies
* visual scripting
* networking
* editors
* geometry
* rendering
* culling
* in-game ui
* editor ui
* copy-paste
* kinematics
* physics integration
* plugin support
* build system
its just a tower of mistakes i learned not make before i dared to even enter the industry
it is fantastically and incredibly bad.
unity is a bit similar but they add c# complexity to the mix and in the beginning that was a much bigger disaster, especially going with mono. .NET was an enormous misstep by microsoft and remains so, although it improves over time they could have just not gotten it so incredibly wrong to start with.
i could go on.
i definitely blame the developers. of the terrible tools, i couldn't make that badly at most points in my career including the super early days in some cases.
they are also hard to fix because of the staggering depth of the badness.
if you would like more specifics feel free to poke, its more about not typing a wall of text than the cognitive load of knowing better, which is around zero.
oh... and the garbage collection is garbage that enables incompetents to make more garbage. never needed or wanted it. i had one hard memory leak to deal with in my life in native code. and a fucking zillion in their shit fest.
EDIT: i shit you not, it has not learned my first lessons from being an 8 year old trying to draw mandelbrot sets in qbasic.

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- 999900000999 10 days ago
  
  If you can legitimately make a better engine in your basement, that's just as easy to use then please open source it. If it's in a high level language with types ( C#, Typescript, Haxe, Java) I'll personally donate 100$.
  Both Unity and Unreal have cost billions to make.
  Godot is cool, but GD script isn't fun( in general I hate learning a programming language for a single framework, dart is the last time I do that) and C# support is still ify. Godot tries to do everything Unity can, but can't do them particularly as well. The community is also a cult.
  I've tried Godot like 3 times and it always feels like janky Unity.
  During the Unity drama every single game dev post on Reddit would get a bunch of comments saying you should switch to Godot.
  An open source game engine that doesn't accept PRs and is basically ran by 3 people.
  Neat.
  Personally my dream engine would be Haxe + an editor + docs + Web Assembly/Native/Mobile support.
  But engines are very hard and expensive to make. For my current project, it's so text heavy I realized I'm better off just using React/HTML/CSS.
  The game is meant to be played in a website, but it's going to be open source so you can run it locally if you wish.
  
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