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These two sentences seem to be in tension: > It is named Handmade Quake thanks to the inspiration of the Handmade Dev community, and following the spirit of th

by cbd1984 11y ago

These two sentences seem to be in tension: > It is named Handmade Quake thanks to the inspiration of the Handmade Dev community, and following the spirit of their manifesto, we will be starting with a blank Visual Studio project, nothing pre-written at all, and file by file, will turn it into the source code that id Software released to the world in late 1999. > The main goal for this project is to show you how full video games are actually built. Modern AAA games always seem to be written around a pre-written engine. Yes, the engine had to be written at some point, but it was likely a modified form of a pre-existing engine, and so on, iteratively, until you end up with a blank project you're writing in Turbo C or something similar which existed for MS-DOS in the later 1980s, pre-dating Quake. My point is, modern AAA game development isn't clean slate. It's modification of existing code, which is a topic that seems rather under-emphasized in the introductory programming literature. It would be interesting to see some series of videos which were all about making a non-trivial change to some large codebase which has evolved for a few decades.

binarycrusader 11y ago
If you're trying to argue "pre-built" on the basis that they started with some existing code, that defines almost all software, so does not seems like a useful definition. I think most commenters here would generally associate "pre-built" with the licensing of an existing engine available on the open market. Such as Unity, UE4, etc. The very top AAA game studio actually use their own proprietary engines. For example, EA uses the Frostbite Engine in many titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Frostbite_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Frostbite_games Even if I were to accept the strict definition you proposed, many of the upcoming titles on PlayStation 4, such as Dreams and Tomorrow's Children are essentially completely new game engines. They're breaking new ground in rendering and gameplay technology and are as reasonably close to "from scratch" as you're going to get at this point.
frou_dh 11y ago
I don't find the "AAA" nomenclature worthwhile. So-called AAA development can be akin to factory farming and deliver garbage come release day. It's not necessarily doing anything right or wrong. Quake was primarily a GOOD game, and if it must be classified further, a HIGH-END game.
agentultra 11y ago
True but we're not done building game engines. It's not a solved problem. New hardware, new problems. New code. The point of the Handmade Hero series is to show people how every system is done. It exists because almost all literature and media on how to make games is presented from such a high level that there aren't enough people in this world who know how sound works or how the graphics pipeline works from a holistic perspective. It's all too much a black box and we're told to program with these high-level abstractions without understanding how it all works. This series is for people who literally want to see what's involved in building a system from nothing. It's not necessarily about designing and making a game. It's about building game engines. Presumably it will give the next generation of programmers a foundation on which to build the next UE, Unity, etc.

by cbd1984 11y ago

binarycrusader 11y ago

If you're trying to argue "pre-built" on the basis that they started with some existing code, that defines almost all software, so does not seems like a useful definition. I think most commenters here would generally associate "pre-built" with the licensing of an existing engine available on the open market. Such as Unity, UE4, etc. The very top AAA game studio actually use their own proprietary engines. For example, EA uses the Frostbite Engine in many titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Frostbite_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Frostbite_games Even if I were to accept the strict definition you proposed, many of the upcoming titles on PlayStation 4, such as Dreams and Tomorrow's Children are essentially completely new game engines. They're breaking new ground in rendering and gameplay technology and are as reasonably close to "from scratch" as you're going to get at this point.

frou_dh 11y ago

I don't find the "AAA" nomenclature worthwhile. So-called AAA development can be akin to factory farming and deliver garbage come release day. It's not necessarily doing anything right or wrong. Quake was primarily a GOOD game, and if it must be classified further, a HIGH-END game.

agentultra 11y ago

True but we're not done building game engines. It's not a solved problem. New hardware, new problems. New code. The point of the Handmade Hero series is to show people how every system is done. It exists because almost all literature and media on how to make games is presented from such a high level that there aren't enough people in this world who know how sound works or how the graphics pipeline works from a holistic perspective. It's all too much a black box and we're told to program with these high-level abstractions without understanding how it all works. This series is for people who literally want to see what's involved in building a system from nothing. It's not necessarily about designing and making a game. It's about building game engines. Presumably it will give the next generation of programmers a foundation on which to build the next UE, Unity, etc.