4 ms·

The need for high performance meets with my creative interests. (But I also have technical interest in making the engine). I also value the ability of being abl

by crafn 11y ago

The need for high performance meets with my creative interests. (But I also have technical interest in making the engine). I also value the ability of being able to implement extraordinary features to the engine in a whim, which is hard with large general use engines. I agree that there is a class of games that can be easily implemented with a prebuilt engine, but this is not one of them.

golergka 11y ago
> I agree that there is a class of games that can be easily implemented with a prebuilt engine, but this is not one of them. This "class of games" includes more or less everything that a single developer without a very costly art department can produce. If your game can not be implemented with a prebuilt engine, it's really something extraordinary.
- w0utert 11y ago
  I think it's pretty clear from the article that using an off-the-shelf engine is not an option for the author, because it doesn't satisfy his interest in building game engines ;-) That said, I agree with your previous comment about performance. Rarely, if ever, should using one programming language over another limit the performance of any game so much that it would severely affect what you can and can not do gameplay- or feature wise. Unless you use some highly dynamic scripting language that fundamentally doesn't fit the problem domain, of course (I wouldn't write a 3D engine in Python or Ruby, for example). I can somewhat understand some of the other arguments of choosing C over C++ (primarily build times), but for the most part the problems the author has with C++ appear to be philosophical. You can have almost everything you want in C++, if you're prepared to use it differently depending on your requirements. In terms of performance, it really is true that optimization only pays off for small sections of your code, so it doesn't make any sense to switch languages for that. You can most definitely make an extremely efficient data-oriented entity-component system in C++ without going having to jump through any hoops, for example.
krisdol 11y ago
>I agree that there is a class of games that can be easily implemented with a prebuilt engine, but this is not one of them. I'm sure everything from minecraft and Dwarf Fortress through Battlefield 4 could have been implemented in a prebuilt engine.
- golergka 11y ago
  Not sure about Battlefield 4 — this kind of graphics pipeline modification is hardly available in Unity.

by crafn 11y ago

golergka 11y ago

> I agree that there is a class of games that can be easily implemented with a prebuilt engine, but this is not one of them. This "class of games" includes more or less everything that a single developer without a very costly art department can produce. If your game can not be implemented with a prebuilt engine, it's really something extraordinary.

w0utert 11y ago
I think it's pretty clear from the article that using an off-the-shelf engine is not an option for the author, because it doesn't satisfy his interest in building game engines ;-) That said, I agree with your previous comment about performance. Rarely, if ever, should using one programming language over another limit the performance of any game so much that it would severely affect what you can and can not do gameplay- or feature wise. Unless you use some highly dynamic scripting language that fundamentally doesn't fit the problem domain, of course (I wouldn't write a 3D engine in Python or Ruby, for example). I can somewhat understand some of the other arguments of choosing C over C++ (primarily build times), but for the most part the problems the author has with C++ appear to be philosophical. You can have almost everything you want in C++, if you're prepared to use it differently depending on your requirements. In terms of performance, it really is true that optimization only pays off for small sections of your code, so it doesn't make any sense to switch languages for that. You can most definitely make an extremely efficient data-oriented entity-component system in C++ without going having to jump through any hoops, for example.

krisdol 11y ago

>I agree that there is a class of games that can be easily implemented with a prebuilt engine, but this is not one of them. I'm sure everything from minecraft and Dwarf Fortress through Battlefield 4 could have been implemented in a prebuilt engine.

golergka 11y ago
Not sure about Battlefield 4 — this kind of graphics pipeline modification is hardly available in Unity.