Comment by amjoshuamichael
Comment by amjoshuamichael 11 days ago
I'm starting to believe there is an external force that drives down the quality of game engines over time. In most tech, the things that catch on are the things that are the easiest to develop curriculum for. The shape of a node-based editor like Unity is uniquely suited to explaining over a number of classes. (Source: I had to learn Unity at my University) On the other hand, an engine like raylib can be grokked in an afternoon, so a university-level raylib class wouldn't work. So you have all these amateur game developers and programmers coming out of diploma mills, and all they know is Unity/Unreal, so companies hire Unity/Unreal, so universities teach it, etc. See also: Java being popular. Then of course, all these companies have wildly different needs for their Unity projects, so Unity, being a for-profit company that serves its customers and not a single disgruntled programmer, has to conform their engine. So you end up with 'turbobloat.' (amazing term, btw)
The Half-Life and Morrowind engines are in a unique situation where they're put together by enthusiastic programmers who are paid to develop stuff they think is cool. You end up with minimal engines and great tech, suited to the needs of professional game developers.
This seems like something that sits in between a raylib and a Unity. I haven't used it, but I worry that it's doesn't do enough to appeal to amateur programmers, but it does too much to appeal to the kind of programmer who wants a smaller engine. I could be very wrong though, I hope to be very wrong. Seems like the performance here is very nice and it's very well put together. There's definitely a wave of developers coming out frustrated from Unity right now. As the nostalgia cycle moves to the 2000's, there's a very real demand to play and create games that are no more graphically complex than Half-Life 2.
Anyway, great project. Great web design. Documentation is written in a nice voice.
The other thing to remember is the games and the engines built together handle each other - Doom couldn't have a floor above another floor (engine limitation because of CPU limitations) so the level designers created tricks to make it feel like it did.
When you're designing both you can take advantage of features you add but also avoid the ones you can't do well - or even change the art style to "fit" the engine - pixelated angular mobs fit Minecraft quite well, but once they start getting more and more detailed you're in an "uncanny valley" where they look worse and more dated than Minecraft - until you finally have enough polygons to render something decent.