Comment by loh

Comment by loh 6 hours ago

3 replies

Just for fun, I built a first person shooter game in UE5 from scratch using agentic coding. I've only spent a couple of months on it in my free time so far, and it isn't complete yet, but it's close enough that I could definitely release an early access version with another month or so of work. The most time consuming tasks have actually been tasks that agentic coding hasn't been able to help out with, like animations and mapping. The game is mostly written in C++ and sometimes the agent makes some bad decisions, but with a bit of extra guidance and being smart about my git commits so that I can revert and try again if necessary, I've always been able to make it work the way I want. I most definitely would not have been able to build this on my own in any reasonable amount of time.

FWIW it seems like it heavily depends on the agent + model you're using. I've had the most success with Claude Code (Sonnet), and only tried Opus 4.5 for more complex things. I've also tried Codex which didn't seem very good by comparison, plus a handful of other local models (Qwen3, GLM, Minimax, etc.) through OpenCode, Roo, and Cline that I'm able to run on my 128 GB M4 Max. The local ones can work for very simple agentic tasks, albeit quite slow.

theshrike79 5 hours ago

The best way to think about Codex is an outsourced contractor.

You give it a well-defined task, it'll putter away quietly and come back with results.

I've found it to be pretty good at code reviews or large refactoring operations, not so much building new features.

VladimirGolovin 5 hours ago

Did you encounter any issues related to the fact that Unreal Engine uses a specific / custom flavor of C++?

  • loh 4 hours ago

    Not really, no, at least not with Claude. It seems to already understand the UE5 way of doing things, but there were a couple of edge cases for new features beyond its cutoff date where I had to refer Claude to the UE5 documentation. Once it read the documentation however, it understood and continued without issue. Also, for any compilation errors, I just copy and paste the error messages into Claude Code and it usually fixes it immediately.