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I would hazard that game engines are an order of magnitude more complex than web frameworks. A better analogy may be game engine vs db engine or web framework+r
by vvanders 5y ago
I would hazard that game engines are an order of magnitude more complex than web frameworks. A better analogy may be game engine vs db engine or web framework+runtime(ex: Erlang/Elixir+Phoenix). If you have performance issues with a web framework you can scale it horizontally to a degree(depending on downstream dependencies like your DB). Games are built to run against resource constrained hardware and so they optimize for specific usage patterns.
There's also the issue that most engines are built to be good at a specific game type and may make trade-offs in terms of how assets are managed and scene complexity. An open-world has much more different requirements than an on-rails shooter. For instance I had to do some pretty heavy retrofitting of one of those engines to handle LoD/geometry streaming and a bunch of other optimizations to make them work well with a large sight-distance game.
- pjmlp 5y agoDepends on the game engine, most 2D ones are quite comparable.
- Kuinox 5y agoNo no, browser contain components similar to a game engine, browser are way more complex, and frustrating, because you do not control the specs.
- pjmlp 5y agoDepends on what the game engine X and Web Framework Y are trying to achieve.
- Kuinox 5y agoThat's true, but you can see new open source engines rising becoming a serious choice to make games. Not so much for web browsers.
- pjmlp 5y agoDepends on the motivation and how much of ChromeOS one wants to implement. https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1508953394836353024 https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1508953394836353024
- meheleventyone 5y agoI’d go an order of complexity above again. The real comparison is to the browser, particularly for general purpose engines like Unreal and Unity. I’d hazard most game engine teams are bigger than most browser teams.
- selfmodruntime 5y agoI disagree. Modern web browsers are the most complicated pieces of technology we have today. The amount of work that goes into sandboxing and security alone probably eclipses the complexity of game engines.
- WJW 5y agoThat seems very optimistic when compared to some of the bigger engineering projects we have going as humanity. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines as a whole system (including the multiple computer networks and their software) are much more complex than browsers, to say nothing of one-offs like the ISS (lots of cutting edge hardware but also full of software) and the systems controlling modern factories. Browsers don't even come close.
- remus 5y agoI think it's kind of hard to quantify complexity in a way that compares nicely across domains. For example, a lot of the complexity in a browser comes from needing to service ~billions of users across thousands of devices using loosely implemented standards. This is quite a different problem to building an aircraft carrier, where you're going to run in to hard engineering and physics problems but you only have to target ~10k well trained users.
- eternityforest 5y agoWeb frameworks are nowhere near as complicated as browsers
- dagw 5y agoI’d go an order of complexity above again. Not when you start. While UE5 is no doubt orders of magnitude more complex than any web framework, no one sets out to write UE5. In fact most people start writing their own game engine because they want something a lot less complex and more tailored than what is available. If you have the right background knocking out a very simple game engine isn't hard. Many people do it as part of a university course. The problem is that your 'simple' game engine ends up being not that simple very quickly once you start adding features.