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I still think that there should be some room for rogue developers who want to make “weirder” games that need specific technical decisions that you can’t make in

I still think that there should be some room for rogue developers who want to make “weirder” games that need specific technical decisions that you can’t make inside an existing game engine. Unity and Unreal all assume that the world you are making is generally made up of static environmental objects, and are hyper-optimized for that use-case both in terms of workflow and performance optimizations. But for types of games that emphasize simulation, procedural generation, or user creation, these assumptions might not hold and custom engines might serve them better. (Games that come to mind are No Man’a Land, Dreams, Factorio, They Are Billions, etc…)

formerly_proven 4y ago
There's WebGPU Native, with wgpu-native implementing it on top of wgpu, using Vulkan/Metal/DX11/DX12.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  It's still work-in-progress though, and people who are developing games right now shouldn't gamble on it. I would rather want to stick with something that has been for at least 5 years and has successfully shipped multiple games, so that's why I'm using Vulkan even with all its problems. (Maybe I should have used DX11 though, if I was seeking for even more stability.)
- pjmlp 4y ago
  The restriction there is that by definition will be constrained to the GPU capabilities exposed to WebGPU. Of course, there can be extensions, but use enough of them and it starts not to make sense to use it for native code.
d_tr 4y ago
AMD had V-EZ which seemed interesting to me when I played a bit with Vulkan, but unfortunately it has been unmaintained since 2018...
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  People were teasing the idea of a good-enough Metal-like API on top of Vulkan that takes care of the pain points since the early days (most notably this article: https://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-graphics-apis/ https://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-gra...), but so far, nothing has materialized.

formerly_proven 4y ago

There's WebGPU Native, with wgpu-native implementing it on top of wgpu, using Vulkan/Metal/DX11/DX12.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
It's still work-in-progress though, and people who are developing games right now shouldn't gamble on it. I would rather want to stick with something that has been for at least 5 years and has successfully shipped multiple games, so that's why I'm using Vulkan even with all its problems. (Maybe I should have used DX11 though, if I was seeking for even more stability.)
pjmlp 4y ago
The restriction there is that by definition will be constrained to the GPU capabilities exposed to WebGPU. Of course, there can be extensions, but use enough of them and it starts not to make sense to use it for native code.

d_tr 4y ago

AMD had V-EZ which seemed interesting to me when I played a bit with Vulkan, but unfortunately it has been unmaintained since 2018...

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
People were teasing the idea of a good-enough Metal-like API on top of Vulkan that takes care of the pain points since the early days (most notably this article: https://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-graphics-apis/ https://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-gra...), but so far, nothing has materialized.