Comment by mollusc-engine
Comment by mollusc-engine a day ago
A lot of the work done when making games in Unreal is done in the editor, not in source code.
Also, Unreal source code will be the very last thing LLMs understand. This is the most complex software ever.
There’s an algorithm called Nanite for automatically reducing the triangle count on geometry that’s far from the camera. As in there are not manually made separate level-of-detail models. The algorithm can modify models, reducing quality as they get farther.
This one algorithm is a tiny piece of the engine yet has a 1,000 page white paper.
Also, even when I don’t know how something works algorithmically, usually I at least have some intuition about where to start. I haven’t the slightest idea how to approach this problem.
No way. Take baby steps. Write an operating system first. Write a compiler first.
Here's a blog post[1] from last year regarding an open-source implementation of virtual geometry. The linked code is maybe a couple thousand lines. It's not something you'd write in an afternoon, but it's also not the towering monument of complexity that Epic Games pretends it is.
[1]: https://jms55.github.io/posts/2024-06-09-virtual-geometry-be...
Edit: I don't mean to sound disparaging - it's some genuinely cool algorithms. It's just that Epic is incentivized to hype it up, and so you get a huge paper and multiple talks that are designed to make it seem even more impressive.