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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 y

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
  is it beyond facebook's capability? no. Is it beyond their will? Yes. I was once naive, I joined Google to make a game engine. My belief at the time was like yours. It's Google, they're a giant company with infinite resources. There's no way this won't take over the game engine world. it wasn't until about 14 months in I realized that competing with Unreal and Unity wasn't just a mater of 30 people building an engine. to actually succeed it would take more like 300-400 people and a mandate for those people to form an everlasting division within the company of support. people to make an IDE, people to continually update the engine and IDE, people to hand hold devs. people to make 100s of videos. people to run classes. people to organize conferences. people to organize game jams. people to do bizdev. people to woo the top devs. people in all the major game dev hubs in the world, people to localize docs, etc... this works for unity and unreal because selling their game engine and services is their core mission. for Google (and for Facebook) all it would ever be is some open source code of some under featured engine they ship once and forget. Unity has about 1000 employees. Unreal has at least 250. Their entire missions are to make, sell, and promote those game engines. That will never be facebook's mission which is why it would never succeed.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    All of what you say is totally reasonable and I don't disagree with any of the thrust. That said, I'm arguing that it's in Facebook's best interest to build the engine and further I think it would make it drastically easier for the dev community if something like it existed. I talked with the Unity founders at GDC and they have very little interest in putting resources around mobile right now , so I think there is a hole in the market that will be really hard to fill by another startup. Hence, why I think these platform owners would be best to tackle it. As an aside, I think it would be more optimal if there were a third party focused on a mobile VR engine - but again, as we agree it's such a huge project, with really difficult distribution pathways, that I think it's too big of a mountain right now for an independent group. So we're gonna be waiting around a while for that.

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
is it beyond facebook's capability? no. Is it beyond their will? Yes. I was once naive, I joined Google to make a game engine. My belief at the time was like yours. It's Google, they're a giant company with infinite resources. There's no way this won't take over the game engine world. it wasn't until about 14 months in I realized that competing with Unreal and Unity wasn't just a mater of 30 people building an engine. to actually succeed it would take more like 300-400 people and a mandate for those people to form an everlasting division within the company of support. people to make an IDE, people to continually update the engine and IDE, people to hand hold devs. people to make 100s of videos. people to run classes. people to organize conferences. people to organize game jams. people to do bizdev. people to woo the top devs. people in all the major game dev hubs in the world, people to localize docs, etc... this works for unity and unreal because selling their game engine and services is their core mission. for Google (and for Facebook) all it would ever be is some open source code of some under featured engine they ship once and forget. Unity has about 1000 employees. Unreal has at least 250. Their entire missions are to make, sell, and promote those game engines. That will never be facebook's mission which is why it would never succeed.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  All of what you say is totally reasonable and I don't disagree with any of the thrust. That said, I'm arguing that it's in Facebook's best interest to build the engine and further I think it would make it drastically easier for the dev community if something like it existed. I talked with the Unity founders at GDC and they have very little interest in putting resources around mobile right now , so I think there is a hole in the market that will be really hard to fill by another startup. Hence, why I think these platform owners would be best to tackle it. As an aside, I think it would be more optimal if there were a third party focused on a mobile VR engine - but again, as we agree it's such a huge project, with really difficult distribution pathways, that I think it's too big of a mountain right now for an independent group. So we're gonna be waiting around a while for that.