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How much work the parsers, layout engine and renderer have to do in a browser is far more opaque than what a game engine does. For game engines there is a lot
by blattimwind 9y ago
How much work the parsers, layout engine and renderer have to do in a browser is far more opaque than what a game engine does.
For game engines there is a lot of material out there explaining the basic processes and data flows; there are free or open source games and game engines around as well: Unreal engine, used in the article, is free, including full access to the source code. (This is by far the most widely used game engine in the entire gaming industry). And with a graphics debugger (free) you can look fairly easily at how games (pretty much any game you can run on your PC) render things as well.
That's not to say that game engines are simple, however, it is relatively easy to understand how they work on a basic level (i.e. what they have to accomplish and how they do so in general terms) and, specifically considering graphics, simple renderers are not particularly hard to develop yourself as a small side project.
With browsers, this is a lot more difficult. There are perhaps three modern browser engines, which are mostly open source but also very large pieces of software. There are no books or tutorials explaining how to develop browser engines. And the debugging tools in the browser only tell you how often a "DOM update" or "render" happened and perhaps how long it took.
- iainmerrick 9y agoVery good point! You don't get "how to write a browser" books in the same way you do with game engines. I wonder if it's because game engines are just more appealing? And also, you can build your own cut-down game engine and that's still useful, whereas there's a very high threshold of functionality needed before a browser is useful. They're actually similar in some ways -- there are a handful of browers and a handful of AAA game engines, and they're all either open source or at least licensable source.
- robbies 9y agoUE4 is not the most widely used game engine in the industry. That would be Unity by a wide margin. If you are restricting to AAA, I’m not even sure if that holds. There are a good amount of big teams that use UE4, I think I’d go with Frostbite due to the sheer amount of titles that EA pushes out that are now based on Frostbite. It’s certainly more big games than UE4 is shipping. I’d probably put Ubisoft ahead of them too with their internal engines.
- prophesi 9y agoIt's difficult to measure game engine usage for AAA games since they can afford to a) build their own internal engine b) pay licensing fees to not disclose what engine they're using. For overall game usage, however, I'd definitely say Unity is most used, with UE4 coming in second
- laythea 9y agoJust think of all the bloat in a browser. Don't mistake size for complexity. Graphics/game engines are complex. Browsers are big. Whilst true, your simple renderer analogy does not work because it is like me saying that if I can create a program to draw some scrolling text then I can create a browser. I presume you have not had to optimise GPU graphics code whilst maintaining compatibility on multiple GPU vendors with a common code base? One game engine is not the same as another and therefore not suitable for bulk comparison with any particular thing. Each game/graphics engine has their own set of requirements, and quality level, and the level of understanding required to "understand" what is actually going on.
- vectorEQ 9y agobrowsers are complex beasts, but they dont need to really go 60+ fps... if a page loads in a second people don't sweat it. if a frame loads in a second, people throw their pc out of a window and rage your company into an early grave ;D
- iainmerrick 9y agoBrowser authors disagree.