4 ms·

Building an engine takes years and a large(~30+) team if you want to match UE4/Unity in terms of productivity.

faragon 10y ago
30, or one Carmack.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
I'm very familiar with what it takes. We built a mobile AR engine based on OpenGL starting back in 2013 that launched in 2015. I'm sure FB has more than enough fantastic personnel and resources to build a great engine.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Game engine != Productivity(artist/designer) focused game engine. I've worked on UE3 based titles, in-house engines and quite a few in-between. Building a new engine from the ground up is easily in the 10s of millions if not more which is why you rarely see new entries into the market. Sure FB could do it, but it probably makes more sense to worth with UE4/Unity to augment them. You'll be able to draw from a large base of developers/designers/artists who already understand the workflow instead of having to build up that community from scratch. [edit] Also the default-large packages of UE titles is mostly a function of optimization, We'd have only ~200mb of system memory back on the PS3 which is way smaller then what modern mobile platforms have available to them. UE has a bunch of things you can do to pull them down, it just takes work.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    I don't disagree with any of that. However the point is it would be huge for the development community but a relatively small project for Facebook. Would solidify platform lock in even further.
    - vvanders 10y ago
      Why do I want a platform lock? As a gamedev that's the worst thing that can happen unless there's substantial compensation on the other side of the equation.
      - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
        Well we don't, but facebook certainly does, which is why I think it's in their interest to do so,
- greggman 10y ago
  Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs. Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE non-programmers can use? Does it have undo? Is it localized into other languages? Does it have a plugin system? Can those plugins be loaded and unloaded while it's running to do you have to exit, recompile, and restart to use plugins. Do you have shader editors? Animation Edtiors? Can you apply different animations to portions of a character? Do you have physics? How about phyiscally based animations? I'm sure you're going to tell me "yes" to all of those but sorry, as someone who's made several engines myself NES, Amiga, 3D0, DOS, Windows, PS1, PS2, PS3/XBOX 360, I know from experience that just "making an engine" is like 3% of the real work involved in getting to the level of Unreal and Unity. It's very easy to "make an engine", it's a lot harder to fill it out with features and tools.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    Right which is totally out of scope of Facebook's capabilities right? Give me a break. You can pile up an infinite list of capabilities for any kind of ide, engine, editor etc... Point is, if anyone can do it its Facebook and it would be great for the dev community. Take that chip of your shoulder for a minute.
    - vvanders 10y ago
      There's no chip on his shoulder, all of those things listed are stuff that UE supports out of the box. There's also a ton of things not mentioned like the cinematic editor, scripting system, cooking process, etc. Honestly even if Facebook could, I'm not sure I want them to. I've got enough privacy concerns around what they do on the web. The last thing I need is to have a game engine that's used to mine every piece of data then can from me. When you have a non-games company controlling a platform their concerns are going to be above what's best for the content creators(see also: publishers).
    - greggman 10y ago
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Ha, well it looks like I was right, except instead of an engine for VR they made it for AR.

30, or one Carmack.

I'm very familiar with what it takes. We built a mobile AR engine based on OpenGL starting back in 2013 that launched in 2015. I'm sure FB has more than enough fantastic personnel and resources to build a great engine.

vvanders 10y ago
Game engine != Productivity(artist/designer) focused game engine. I've worked on UE3 based titles, in-house engines and quite a few in-between. Building a new engine from the ground up is easily in the 10s of millions if not more which is why you rarely see new entries into the market. Sure FB could do it, but it probably makes more sense to worth with UE4/Unity to augment them. You'll be able to draw from a large base of developers/designers/artists who already understand the workflow instead of having to build up that community from scratch. [edit] Also the default-large packages of UE titles is mostly a function of optimization, We'd have only ~200mb of system memory back on the PS3 which is way smaller then what modern mobile platforms have available to them. UE has a bunch of things you can do to pull them down, it just takes work.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  I don't disagree with any of that. However the point is it would be huge for the development community but a relatively small project for Facebook. Would solidify platform lock in even further.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Why do I want a platform lock? As a gamedev that's the worst thing that can happen unless there's substantial compensation on the other side of the equation.
    - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
      Well we don't, but facebook certainly does, which is why I think it's in their interest to do so,
greggman 10y ago
Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs. Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE non-programmers can use? Does it have undo? Is it localized into other languages? Does it have a plugin system? Can those plugins be loaded and unloaded while it's running to do you have to exit, recompile, and restart to use plugins. Do you have shader editors? Animation Edtiors? Can you apply different animations to portions of a character? Do you have physics? How about phyiscally based animations? I'm sure you're going to tell me "yes" to all of those but sorry, as someone who's made several engines myself NES, Amiga, 3D0, DOS, Windows, PS1, PS2, PS3/XBOX 360, I know from experience that just "making an engine" is like 3% of the real work involved in getting to the level of Unreal and Unity. It's very easy to "make an engine", it's a lot harder to fill it out with features and tools.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Right which is totally out of scope of Facebook's capabilities right? Give me a break. You can pile up an infinite list of capabilities for any kind of ide, engine, editor etc... Point is, if anyone can do it its Facebook and it would be great for the dev community. Take that chip of your shoulder for a minute.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    There's no chip on his shoulder, all of those things listed are stuff that UE supports out of the box. There's also a ton of things not mentioned like the cinematic editor, scripting system, cooking process, etc. Honestly even if Facebook could, I'm not sure I want them to. I've got enough privacy concerns around what they do on the web. The last thing I need is to have a game engine that's used to mine every piece of data then can from me. When you have a non-games company controlling a platform their concerns are going to be above what's best for the content creators(see also: publishers).
  - greggman 10y ago

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

Ha, well it looks like I was right, except instead of an engine for VR they made it for AR.