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> Game development is a weird place. You want to be low level to get the most performance, but you also want to be expressive to be able to write an ambitious

> Game development is a weird place. You want to be low level to get the most performance, but you also want to be expressive to be able to write an ambitious game. The vast majority of games don't need to be low level for performance. Practically nobody outside of massive AAA studios is writing architecture specific assembly for modern PCs or consoles (and even in those studios, there are very few people doing so). The majority of gameplay programmers are writing bog standard C++ that would be just as performant in C#, or in many cases a lot of the logic is written in a higher level scripting language that is orders of magnitude slower than the native C++, or even just writing all of the game code in something like C#. > Really does invite the notion that there ought to be a better way, you get a sort of itch you can't quite reach to scratch. Oh for sure, and there often are better ways to solve these problems. In my experience, one of the most common reasons for not doing things better is because the codebase is based on an engine from 20+ years ago when they _did_ have to avoid interfaces and virtual function calls for game performance, and you have "modern" systems that are built on top of those abstractions (in the same way that lots of modern networking libraries still leak details about concerns from the 80s/90s)

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Depends entirely on what you want to do. Use a bog standard engine, and you get Satisfactory. If you build your own, you can have Factorio. The former will never reach the sort of simulation complexity the latter can even on modest hardware.
- maccard 5y ago
  > The former will never reach the sort of simulation complexity the latter can even on modest hardware. You're comparing games rather than engines here. There is no reason at all that you can't write your simulation logic in vanilla bare bones C++ as factorio has done, and still get the benefit of using an existing engine. You get all the neat (and hard) things like serialisation, multiplatform support, networking, asset management, patching, and a bunch of other things. Sure, factorio may not need a 3d renderer, but it definitely needs and uses the rest of what I listed above.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    The problem is you can't deal with the number of entities factorio regularly does on a stock engine. They just aren't made to deal with hundreds of millions of stateful and non-trivially interacting entities. That's not what game engines are built optimized for.
    - maccard 5y ago
      Just because you're using unreal doesn't mean you need to have one actor per entity (for example). Using [0] as an example, there's no reason you can't implement a cache optimized simulation algorithm in C++ and pass the results out to UE4 instead of whatever layer factorio is using. To be fair, factorio is a pretty good example of when the existing options offer limited value (lock step networking, _very_ simplistic rendering, very little in the vein of "gameplay" features), but it's one of very very few. For every factorio, there's 100 2d side scrollin platforms that are written in a custom C++ engine rather than using unity. [0] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Using Unity for a 2D side scroller is like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. 2D side scrollers don't really need much in the way of an 'engine'.
        maccard 5y ago
        Reimplementing all of the features that unity provides for you is time spent on "just" adding a level editor, asset loading, character animations, scalable UI, collision detection, networking, state management, serialization,gamepad support, multiplatform support, store/platform integrations, when you could have been building a game. I can spend a month building a bare bones C++ engine that gives me all of the above and start into my game, or I can download unity, start with all of those features and spend a month working on my game.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Depends entirely on what you want to do. Use a bog standard engine, and you get Satisfactory. If you build your own, you can have Factorio. The former will never reach the sort of simulation complexity the latter can even on modest hardware.

maccard 5y ago
> The former will never reach the sort of simulation complexity the latter can even on modest hardware. You're comparing games rather than engines here. There is no reason at all that you can't write your simulation logic in vanilla bare bones C++ as factorio has done, and still get the benefit of using an existing engine. You get all the neat (and hard) things like serialisation, multiplatform support, networking, asset management, patching, and a bunch of other things. Sure, factorio may not need a 3d renderer, but it definitely needs and uses the rest of what I listed above.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  The problem is you can't deal with the number of entities factorio regularly does on a stock engine. They just aren't made to deal with hundreds of millions of stateful and non-trivially interacting entities. That's not what game engines are built optimized for.
  - maccard 5y ago
    Just because you're using unreal doesn't mean you need to have one actor per entity (for example). Using [0] as an example, there's no reason you can't implement a cache optimized simulation algorithm in C++ and pass the results out to UE4 instead of whatever layer factorio is using. To be fair, factorio is a pretty good example of when the existing options offer limited value (lock step networking, _very_ simplistic rendering, very little in the vein of "gameplay" features), but it's one of very very few. For every factorio, there's 100 2d side scrollin platforms that are written in a custom C++ engine rather than using unity. [0] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Using Unity for a 2D side scroller is like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. 2D side scrollers don't really need much in the way of an 'engine'.
      - maccard 5y ago
        Reimplementing all of the features that unity provides for you is time spent on "just" adding a level editor, asset loading, character animations, scalable UI, collision detection, networking, state management, serialization,gamepad support, multiplatform support, store/platform integrations, when you could have been building a game. I can spend a month building a bare bones C++ engine that gives me all of the above and start into my game, or I can download unity, start with all of those features and spend a month working on my game.