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25 years ago people would have said the same thing about OS kernels, and yet here we are. Some of the underlying problems I see are that the game industry is st

25 years ago people would have said the same thing about OS kernels, and yet here we are. Some of the underlying problems I see are that the game industry is still young and hasn't really standardized everything yet. Because of that, there is still ruthless competition between the hardware and GFX card vendors. Vulkan is a step in the right direction, but it will obviously take time for it to become adopted. A lot of it is also driven by the popularity of consoles and mobile devices which are still largely locked-down walled gardens. They intentionally make it difficult to share code between platforms too. But, soon enough game developers will get sick of writing the same code over and over again, just as OS developers did in the 90s. Once this happens you'll start to see a lot more ad-hoc code sharing which will pave the way for more engines being made free software.

vvanders 10y ago
That's a pretty naive view of things, it's not the lack of GPU standardization that drives engines, it's the fact that fundamental bits of gameplay drive very diverse engine requirements. For instance UE3 makes a horrible engine for open-world games since it's built on loading levels whole-sale and doing very little streaming aside from textures. If you need a game that requires 60FPS(racing, fighting/etc) something that is GC based won't cut it. I've worked in in-house and external engines(UE3, Unity) and you always have to re-write large portions to make them work for your gameplay. There are fundamental tradeoffs that make it hard to do otherwise. At every project there comes a point where you no longer take unlevels from mainline, fork the code and make deliberate breaking changes to ship the game vision that was set out by the team.