6 ms·

Making game engines is a waste of time – I probably won’t stop making them

76 points by RupertWiser 6y ago

shepherdjerred 6y ago
My college has a senior project course every spring. The class is divided into groups of four to five members. Each group implements the same board game as a video game in a competition. The board game always is always deterministic with perfect information (i.e. chess or checkers). Most team use Unity. Two years ago there was an unsuccessful attempt in Unreal, and three years ago an excellent game with web technologies (Electron + Angular). I took this course last year and my team took a different approach. Our class's board game was Quoridor[1] and my group wrote a game engine[2] in Java leveraging OpenGL for graphics and Netty for socket abstractions. The amount I learned that semester was incredible. Never before have I needed to know anything about graphics rendering, how to load fonts from a file and convert it into a texture format. I never needed to know about how to actually create a networked application, how to use genetic algorithms to tune AI weights, or put all of that together to create a game. Our game sucked, but it was the most productive three months of my education and I learned more through that self-imposed struggle than my prior three years and a half years of classes. A game engine can touch any field in computer science and bring it into one application, and I think that's incredible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoridor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoridor [2] https://github.com/harding-capstone https://github.com/harding-capstone
MalcolmComwell 6y ago
I'm reminded of Jonathan Blow's talk, "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" [1]. Are we going to end up with a generation of game developers who don't understand the internals of their game engines? The unreal engine 5 demo has really wowed everyone but could we maybe reach a point in the future where these amazing game engines are struggling to compete against really inefficient game code? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  In C/C++, dependency management is not as convenient as in Rust. There's Conan, but you have to install it. Rust comes with Cargo. So, in C++, there are more game engines developed using a minimal amount of dependencies, and in Rust, there are more game engines developed using more external dependencies. As the majority of people transition to Rust, even the people working on "lower level" code will also forget what internals are about.
- troughway 6y ago
  One reason why I’m not a fan of Unity. Game engines are leaky abstractions. You hit a point where you need to know how things in general work - even if you don’t know the implementation verbatim. Most of anything to do with programming is a leaky abstraction so hiding source code from developers and saying “you don’t need to know that” is charming at best, idiotic at worst. Net code issues, rendering equations and HSV knowledge, audio buffers and DSP, input controller and output display latency/VR, psychology, down to IEE754 optimizations. The more you know, the better for you.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't use multiple accounts like this, or for voting. It's against HN's rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  I don’t see this as realistic. Particularly when engines like UE4 and probably 5 share their source code and have a layer writing in amongst the engine cruft. Further engines like Unity whilst they don’t provide source don’t really mean you can make anything other than the simplest games without understanding what’s going on under the hood to a reasonable degree. Less technically adept game developers can get a good head start but generally will need to lean on technical colleagues or contractors. Game development as a craft also requires a lot of creative problem solving which lends the people seriously involved in it to naturally push and probe at the edges of their knowledge.
- friendlybus 6y ago
fwsgonzo 6y ago
I have the same problem - love working on the game engine (I have several), but thankfully I found someone who loves designing games and drawing pixel art. Also, he doesn't know what "using RISC-V virtual machines with thin C++ binaries as a scripting language" means, so he can't complain about all the stupid shit I'm doing!
klodolph 6y ago
It’s a bit unfortunate that this issue is so contentious on game development forums. Someone wants to make a game engine, or asks for help with some aspect of making a game engine, and someone will often reply by saying “you should just use Unity” or something similar. It may be well-intentioned and they may give good reasons why you should just use engine X instead of rolling your own, but here’s the big problem… Before you help someone, you gotta understand what their motives are. The next part is simple—if you’re under no illusions that you are not making money by making games, the kind of dollars/time input, salable product output efficiency ratio just stops being relevant. So some other factor is relevant, if you are a hobbyist.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Someone wants to make a game engine, or asks for help with some aspect of making a game engine, and someone will often reply by saying “you should just use Unity” or something similar. That's also a classic BS response in Stack Overflow and such. Someone asks "How do I do X?" And people will jump to comment "You shouldn't do X, etc" instead of answering the question (and if needed, adding a caveat that they don't recommend it). Many times people very well know the drawbacks of X, that it's considered a bad practice, etc, and also how to do it "the right way", but want to do X anyway for some specific reason (hacking, working around some issue, etc).
  - davidivadavid 6y ago
    True, but most times when asking for help, people are not aware of the drawbacks, and are trying to solve a problem in a completely inefficient way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem So it's not so much of a "BS response" as a rational first response, even if frustrating for people who don't fall in that category.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      It’s well-intentioned but I would like to hold people to higher standards.
pengaru 6y ago
Butchering Eisenhower's famous quote about planning in times of war: > In producing a skilled game developer, I have always found that their self-made engines are useless, but the development experience is indispensable.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
I remember this urge, it took me once. I wrote a physics+animation engine for the Palm Pilot(!) and wrote a couple games in it - Lexicon and Combinoid. Moving sprites, collision, physics. Fun while it lasted. Turns out there wasn't really a market for games on the Palm Pilot. Oh well.
mrfusion 6y ago
We still need a world class, best of breed, open source game engine, no? It seems like game engines should go the way of linux. No one would really consider making a new commercial os these days.
- thinknboutstuff 6y ago
  Have you checked out the Godot engine? I don't think it's at the polish of Unreal or Unity, but it's probably the closest attempt for open source.
- yters 6y ago
  I've wondered whether we should see more experimentation in the OS space. Why should Windows, Linux and Unix monopolize everything? Also, with FPGAs, maybe we should see more OS HW level experimentation.
yters 6y ago
The general case game engine, such as Unity, are one size fits all. It can make sense to make specialized game engines that optimize for a specific gameplay dynamic.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stephc_int13 6y ago
Today, building a custom game engine does not necessarily mean building everything from scratch. A lot of very good open-source libs can be assembled to relatively quickly build a working engine tailored for the needs of the games you want to build. SDL, bgfx or Diligent can be used a simple platform/rendering abstractions, many of the excellent stb libs can be used for resources loading, or Assimp if you need 3D assets, simple or complex physics engine are also available, same for audio and networking...
- moonchild 6y ago
  Most of what goes into a game engine is not those. SDL is a similar level of abstraction to win32/x11/... Bgfx/diligent have a similar level abstraction to d3d/opengl/... (And if you are a solo engine-writer, you're not going to write more than one custom windowing/graphics target anyway, so those libs don't reduce the amount of work you have to do.) A basic image loader for a format like bmp or netpbm is trivial. Here are all the dependencies for my game engine right now: - Assimp - Freetype - SDL - Linear algebra library - Intel intrinsics library (transitive dependency of the math library) - S7 scheme - stb-image - Toml parser - Audio library I estimate it would take under a week to replace all those except freetype and assimp, and freetype could be replaced with bitmapped fonts. Making an engine is as much (or as little) work as it's ever been because, similarly to a web browser or an OS, the challenge is designing and implementing application infrastructure. _______________________________________________________ More interesting, IMO, is to look at the ways that general-purpose engines have allowed people to avoid building engines in the first place. Something like unity is a toolbox to let you build any game you would want without needing to write thousands of lines of infrastructure code. Even lighter-weight toolkits like love,fna,raylib are general enough to be usable for a broad variety of games, while still providing enough specific functionality that you can just start writing your game.
thrower123 6y ago
It's unfortunate that everything has gone high-level (Unity/Unreal) or ultra low-level (Vulkan/Metal/DX12). In the 2000s hobbyists were doing stuff in the middle level, because you had to stitch together your window management, GL/DX code, physics libraries, sound libraries, net code, input code, yourself. I don't know that you always want to do that, but everybody ought to do it at least once.
fxtentacle 6y ago
It's not a waste of time. For effectively using off the shelf game engines, you need to have a good understanding of what's going on under the hood. And the best way to learn that is by building your own toy engine.
accidentalrebel 6y ago
I'm currently making a game engine myself and it has been both challenging and fulfilling. I don't expect people to use what I've made, but as long as I learn from it, it is not going to be a waste of time. Each step on making the engine has been full of important lessons: * With OpenGL I learned about graphics and how they are rendered on a screen. Knowledge on this has helped with optimizations on my other projects made with Unity * Adding Lisp scripting has renewed my love of Lisp and has made me realize the importance of scripting on game engines * Implementing cross platform has made me realize just how difficult this is and why most people jsut go with Unity because it's offered out of the box. * Designing APIs and functions is not trivial. Each game engine has a different way of doing things and it is mostly dictated by their technology stack. I'm working on this mostly for learning purposes and I've been logging my journey every step of the way. If anyone is intetested in checking it out, or give suggestions or critiques, here's the link: https://github.com/accidentalrebel/Rebel-Game-Engine https://github.com/accidentalrebel/Rebel-Game-Engine
_bxg1 6y ago
I love this mindset. I think as engineers we often get discouraged when we feel like our own implementation of something could never be as good as what's already out there (at least, I do). But the question that should be asked is: "Would it make me happy to do it myself?" If so, then who cares! Hobby projects are about making yourself happy. There's nothing wrong with doing something purely for fun.
jaimex2 6y ago
If you really want to make a game that doesn't give the user a feeling that they've played it before you do need to make your own engine. You can tell in seconds that a game feels and renders like another game using the same engine. Sometimes the quirks and unique characteristics of a custom engine are what give a game its charm and X factor.

76 points by RupertWiser 6y ago

My college has a senior project course every spring. The class is divided into groups of four to five members. Each group implements the same board game as a video game in a competition. The board game always is always deterministic with perfect information (i.e. chess or checkers). Most team use Unity. Two years ago there was an unsuccessful attempt in Unreal, and three years ago an excellent game with web technologies (Electron + Angular). I took this course last year and my team took a different approach. Our class's board game was Quoridor[1] and my group wrote a game engine[2] in Java leveraging OpenGL for graphics and Netty for socket abstractions. The amount I learned that semester was incredible. Never before have I needed to know anything about graphics rendering, how to load fonts from a file and convert it into a texture format. I never needed to know about how to actually create a networked application, how to use genetic algorithms to tune AI weights, or put all of that together to create a game. Our game sucked, but it was the most productive three months of my education and I learned more through that self-imposed struggle than my prior three years and a half years of classes. A game engine can touch any field in computer science and bring it into one application, and I think that's incredible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoridor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoridor [2] https://github.com/harding-capstone https://github.com/harding-capstone

MalcolmComwell 6y ago

I'm reminded of Jonathan Blow's talk, "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" [1]. Are we going to end up with a generation of game developers who don't understand the internals of their game engines? The unreal engine 5 demo has really wowed everyone but could we maybe reach a point in the future where these amazing game engines are struggling to compete against really inefficient game code? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

29athrowaway 6y ago
In C/C++, dependency management is not as convenient as in Rust. There's Conan, but you have to install it. Rust comes with Cargo. So, in C++, there are more game engines developed using a minimal amount of dependencies, and in Rust, there are more game engines developed using more external dependencies. As the majority of people transition to Rust, even the people working on "lower level" code will also forget what internals are about.
troughway 6y ago
One reason why I’m not a fan of Unity. Game engines are leaky abstractions. You hit a point where you need to know how things in general work - even if you don’t know the implementation verbatim. Most of anything to do with programming is a leaky abstraction so hiding source code from developers and saying “you don’t need to know that” is charming at best, idiotic at worst. Net code issues, rendering equations and HSV knowledge, audio buffers and DSP, input controller and output display latency/VR, psychology, down to IEE754 optimizations. The more you know, the better for you.
dang 6y ago
Please don't use multiple accounts like this, or for voting. It's against HN's rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
meheleventyone 6y ago
I don’t see this as realistic. Particularly when engines like UE4 and probably 5 share their source code and have a layer writing in amongst the engine cruft. Further engines like Unity whilst they don’t provide source don’t really mean you can make anything other than the simplest games without understanding what’s going on under the hood to a reasonable degree. Less technically adept game developers can get a good head start but generally will need to lean on technical colleagues or contractors. Game development as a craft also requires a lot of creative problem solving which lends the people seriously involved in it to naturally push and probe at the edges of their knowledge.
friendlybus 6y ago

fwsgonzo 6y ago

I have the same problem - love working on the game engine (I have several), but thankfully I found someone who loves designing games and drawing pixel art. Also, he doesn't know what "using RISC-V virtual machines with thin C++ binaries as a scripting language" means, so he can't complain about all the stupid shit I'm doing!

klodolph 6y ago

It’s a bit unfortunate that this issue is so contentious on game development forums. Someone wants to make a game engine, or asks for help with some aspect of making a game engine, and someone will often reply by saying “you should just use Unity” or something similar. It may be well-intentioned and they may give good reasons why you should just use engine X instead of rolling your own, but here’s the big problem… Before you help someone, you gotta understand what their motives are. The next part is simple—if you’re under no illusions that you are not making money by making games, the kind of dollars/time input, salable product output efficiency ratio just stops being relevant. So some other factor is relevant, if you are a hobbyist.

coldtea 6y ago
>Someone wants to make a game engine, or asks for help with some aspect of making a game engine, and someone will often reply by saying “you should just use Unity” or something similar. That's also a classic BS response in Stack Overflow and such. Someone asks "How do I do X?" And people will jump to comment "You shouldn't do X, etc" instead of answering the question (and if needed, adding a caveat that they don't recommend it). Many times people very well know the drawbacks of X, that it's considered a bad practice, etc, and also how to do it "the right way", but want to do X anyway for some specific reason (hacking, working around some issue, etc).
- davidivadavid 6y ago
  True, but most times when asking for help, people are not aware of the drawbacks, and are trying to solve a problem in a completely inefficient way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem So it's not so much of a "BS response" as a rational first response, even if frustrating for people who don't fall in that category.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    It’s well-intentioned but I would like to hold people to higher standards.

pengaru 6y ago

Butchering Eisenhower's famous quote about planning in times of war: > In producing a skilled game developer, I have always found that their self-made engines are useless, but the development experience is indispensable.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

I remember this urge, it took me once. I wrote a physics+animation engine for the Palm Pilot(!) and wrote a couple games in it - Lexicon and Combinoid. Moving sprites, collision, physics. Fun while it lasted. Turns out there wasn't really a market for games on the Palm Pilot. Oh well.

mrfusion 6y ago

We still need a world class, best of breed, open source game engine, no? It seems like game engines should go the way of linux. No one would really consider making a new commercial os these days.

thinknboutstuff 6y ago
Have you checked out the Godot engine? I don't think it's at the polish of Unreal or Unity, but it's probably the closest attempt for open source.
yters 6y ago
I've wondered whether we should see more experimentation in the OS space. Why should Windows, Linux and Unix monopolize everything? Also, with FPGAs, maybe we should see more OS HW level experimentation.

yters 6y ago

The general case game engine, such as Unity, are one size fits all. It can make sense to make specialized game engines that optimize for a specific gameplay dynamic.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

stephc_int13 6y ago

Today, building a custom game engine does not necessarily mean building everything from scratch. A lot of very good open-source libs can be assembled to relatively quickly build a working engine tailored for the needs of the games you want to build. SDL, bgfx or Diligent can be used a simple platform/rendering abstractions, many of the excellent stb libs can be used for resources loading, or Assimp if you need 3D assets, simple or complex physics engine are also available, same for audio and networking...

moonchild 6y ago
Most of what goes into a game engine is not those. SDL is a similar level of abstraction to win32/x11/... Bgfx/diligent have a similar level abstraction to d3d/opengl/... (And if you are a solo engine-writer, you're not going to write more than one custom windowing/graphics target anyway, so those libs don't reduce the amount of work you have to do.) A basic image loader for a format like bmp or netpbm is trivial. Here are all the dependencies for my game engine right now: - Assimp - Freetype - SDL - Linear algebra library - Intel intrinsics library (transitive dependency of the math library) - S7 scheme - stb-image - Toml parser - Audio library I estimate it would take under a week to replace all those except freetype and assimp, and freetype could be replaced with bitmapped fonts. Making an engine is as much (or as little) work as it's ever been because, similarly to a web browser or an OS, the challenge is designing and implementing application infrastructure. _______________________________________________________ More interesting, IMO, is to look at the ways that general-purpose engines have allowed people to avoid building engines in the first place. Something like unity is a toolbox to let you build any game you would want without needing to write thousands of lines of infrastructure code. Even lighter-weight toolkits like love,fna,raylib are general enough to be usable for a broad variety of games, while still providing enough specific functionality that you can just start writing your game.

thrower123 6y ago

It's unfortunate that everything has gone high-level (Unity/Unreal) or ultra low-level (Vulkan/Metal/DX12). In the 2000s hobbyists were doing stuff in the middle level, because you had to stitch together your window management, GL/DX code, physics libraries, sound libraries, net code, input code, yourself. I don't know that you always want to do that, but everybody ought to do it at least once.

fxtentacle 6y ago

It's not a waste of time. For effectively using off the shelf game engines, you need to have a good understanding of what's going on under the hood. And the best way to learn that is by building your own toy engine.

accidentalrebel 6y ago

I'm currently making a game engine myself and it has been both challenging and fulfilling. I don't expect people to use what I've made, but as long as I learn from it, it is not going to be a waste of time. Each step on making the engine has been full of important lessons: * With OpenGL I learned about graphics and how they are rendered on a screen. Knowledge on this has helped with optimizations on my other projects made with Unity * Adding Lisp scripting has renewed my love of Lisp and has made me realize the importance of scripting on game engines * Implementing cross platform has made me realize just how difficult this is and why most people jsut go with Unity because it's offered out of the box. * Designing APIs and functions is not trivial. Each game engine has a different way of doing things and it is mostly dictated by their technology stack. I'm working on this mostly for learning purposes and I've been logging my journey every step of the way. If anyone is intetested in checking it out, or give suggestions or critiques, here's the link: https://github.com/accidentalrebel/Rebel-Game-Engine https://github.com/accidentalrebel/Rebel-Game-Engine

_bxg1 6y ago

I love this mindset. I think as engineers we often get discouraged when we feel like our own implementation of something could never be as good as what's already out there (at least, I do). But the question that should be asked is: "Would it make me happy to do it myself?" If so, then who cares! Hobby projects are about making yourself happy. There's nothing wrong with doing something purely for fun.

jaimex2 6y ago

If you really want to make a game that doesn't give the user a feeling that they've played it before you do need to make your own engine. You can tell in seconds that a game feels and renders like another game using the same engine. Sometimes the quirks and unique characteristics of a custom engine are what give a game its charm and X factor.