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I am finding game development to be a tiny bit like this also: very little open source, lots of home-made clunky code, lots of NDAs and secrets. Generally, a mu

I am finding game development to be a tiny bit like this also: very little open source, lots of home-made clunky code, lots of NDAs and secrets. Generally, a much worse developer experience with worse tooling overall. To play devils advocate, it this makes game dev harder, which isn’t entirely bad because there is already a massive number of games being made that can’t sell, so it reduces competition a tiny bit. Also, it’s nice to know you can write a plugin and actually sell it. Still, it’s weird. The community in unreal can even be a bit unfriendly or hostile and they will sometimes mock you if you say you are trying to use Linux. Then again, unity’s community is unbelievably helpful

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
Commercial games benefit way less than other code from being open source, since they are very short-lived projects once released. Further, games would be very easy to copy for users, to develop cheats for multiplayer, to duplicate by competitors, etc.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  The games, sure. But what about the tooling? Behaviour trees, fsm visualizers, debug tools, better linters, multiplayer frameworks, ecs implementations, or even just tech talks. Outside of game dev, there are so many tech talks all the time on every possible subject, sharing knowledge. In game dev, there is GDC and a few others, but it’s just far less common
- tpxl 6y ago
  The closest of multiplayer games die the day they shut down the servers. The longest lived games are the longest lived because they are open enough for the community to keep them alive.
vvanders 6y ago
That depends a lot on platform and engine. X360 development was still one of the best damn environments on dedicated hardware I've ever worked on. PIX was nothing short of amazing and Visual Studio is still a bar I haven't seen touched from and IDE perspective. Compare that with something like Android where I'm lucky if I can get GDB to hit a single breakpoint on a good day.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago

Commercial games benefit way less than other code from being open source, since they are very short-lived projects once released. Further, games would be very easy to copy for users, to develop cheats for multiplayer, to duplicate by competitors, etc.

gentleman11 6y ago
The games, sure. But what about the tooling? Behaviour trees, fsm visualizers, debug tools, better linters, multiplayer frameworks, ecs implementations, or even just tech talks. Outside of game dev, there are so many tech talks all the time on every possible subject, sharing knowledge. In game dev, there is GDC and a few others, but it’s just far less common
tpxl 6y ago
The closest of multiplayer games die the day they shut down the servers. The longest lived games are the longest lived because they are open enough for the community to keep them alive.

vvanders 6y ago

That depends a lot on platform and engine. X360 development was still one of the best damn environments on dedicated hardware I've ever worked on. PIX was nothing short of amazing and Visual Studio is still a bar I haven't seen touched from and IDE perspective. Compare that with something like Android where I'm lucky if I can get GDB to hit a single breakpoint on a good day.