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It's in imperfect analogy. You could argue there's nothing less tightly coupled than web dev. There you choose whatever tools you want as long as you can get

by skohan 5y ago

It's in imperfect analogy. You could argue there's nothing less tightly coupled than web dev. There you choose whatever tools you want as long as you can get it into HTML/CSS/JS at the end of the day. With engine-based gamedev, you buy into a monolith and that will dictate basically everything about how the project has to be built.

cornel_io 5y ago
Web dev is not tightly coupled, but browser dev is, and when you do web dev you're essentially buying into a set of monoliths that have finally after 30 years come together by committee just enough so that you only have to conform to one single way of doing web dev. Javascript has quite seriously sucked for a long time and only recently got a bit better, and HTML and CSS are still trash, so don't talk to me about "dictate basically everything" as if that's not the case there, too. Unity is the equivalent of a browser, not an app or even app framework. It just lives in a world where the competitors haven't done the committee thing to ensure interop (and never will).
- skohan 5y ago
  This is an extremely strange comparison to me. Web is a standards-based, implementation independent platform. That is completely, categorically different from Unity, which is a proprietary tool for making applications. Unity isn't the browser, it's web-flow or square-space. Except it doesn't give you artifacts which are interoperable with other tools at the end.
meheleventyone 5y ago
I mean that’s true of things like Unity as well where you can use whatever tools you want so long as you can get it into the formats it supports. Web dev is theoretically open but in practice runs on Chrome almost exclusively.
- skohan 5y ago
  It's totally different. Browsers are by nature standards-based, and chrome certainly isn't the only browser with significant usage. 10 years from now, if you have built your site according to WC3 standards, theoretically it should just work on every browser out there. If Unity goes out of business, and their editor is no longer available, good luck getting your unity project to build in another environment.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Standards are lovely if everyone follows and supports them but even the three main web engines don’t. And even when they’re similar enough there are significant differences in important characteristics like JS performance. Likewise one of the things thats most fiddly and annoying in game engines is dealing with implementation of things like OpenGL that are based on standards but not actually implemented to spec across OSes and hardware. I agree on the dangers of relying on closed-source, proprietary software but if we wanted to avoid that we could just point to Godot as our monolithic example de jour instead.

by skohan 5y ago

cornel_io 5y ago

Web dev is not tightly coupled, but browser dev is, and when you do web dev you're essentially buying into a set of monoliths that have finally after 30 years come together by committee just enough so that you only have to conform to one single way of doing web dev. Javascript has quite seriously sucked for a long time and only recently got a bit better, and HTML and CSS are still trash, so don't talk to me about "dictate basically everything" as if that's not the case there, too. Unity is the equivalent of a browser, not an app or even app framework. It just lives in a world where the competitors haven't done the committee thing to ensure interop (and never will).

skohan 5y ago
This is an extremely strange comparison to me. Web is a standards-based, implementation independent platform. That is completely, categorically different from Unity, which is a proprietary tool for making applications. Unity isn't the browser, it's web-flow or square-space. Except it doesn't give you artifacts which are interoperable with other tools at the end.

meheleventyone 5y ago

I mean that’s true of things like Unity as well where you can use whatever tools you want so long as you can get it into the formats it supports. Web dev is theoretically open but in practice runs on Chrome almost exclusively.

skohan 5y ago
It's totally different. Browsers are by nature standards-based, and chrome certainly isn't the only browser with significant usage. 10 years from now, if you have built your site according to WC3 standards, theoretically it should just work on every browser out there. If Unity goes out of business, and their editor is no longer available, good luck getting your unity project to build in another environment.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Standards are lovely if everyone follows and supports them but even the three main web engines don’t. And even when they’re similar enough there are significant differences in important characteristics like JS performance. Likewise one of the things thats most fiddly and annoying in game engines is dealing with implementation of things like OpenGL that are based on standards but not actually implemented to spec across OSes and hardware. I agree on the dangers of relying on closed-source, proprietary software but if we wanted to avoid that we could just point to Godot as our monolithic example de jour instead.