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The professionalism of the team really astounds me, from direct and honest communication to the actual quality of the builds. Godot is a treasure I feel and a g

by prox 4y ago

The professionalism of the team really astounds me, from direct and honest communication to the actual quality of the builds. Godot is a treasure I feel and a great example of how to do open source, and build a community.

chefandy 4y ago
I'm currently in a game design undergrad program and was surprised to see how few books are published about specific engines. I'm not positive, but I reckon it was historically a niche domain that changed constantly because it closely followed bleeding edge hardware, and until recently, was mostly proprietary. Just yesterday, a knowledgeable, experienced instructor decided to switch from using Unreal Engine 5.0.3 to 5.1 in class only to find the well-established system for some basic game parameters was deprecated. Game development also requires non-trivial base knowledge about a broad range of topics, i.e. 3D meshes, materials, rigging, lighting, and/or 2D animation, UI concepts, some audio stuff, knowing how event-based programming works, generally, etc. Gaging base knowledge might be difficult! Most people don't need to, or event want to understand the whole huge thing to work on their projects... So even among those interested that's still a tough sell. It would bother me less if the documentation was better. Even in Unreal Engine many of the entries in the API docs are generated from whatever sparse comments are in the engine code. It seems like the standard way to learn these things is to either be motivated enough to stumble around for a few years using tutorials, YouTube videos, overly terse official docs, and reading engine code, or learning from someone who already knows what they're doing, either at a university or on the job. I am pretty green though, so I may be making some faulty assumptions. I've found forcing myself to learn Unreal's Blueprint system taught me more about game development in general than bigger projects in Godot because Unreal is so much more opinionated, but you can pretty easily dig into the mechanics. Godot being so close to Python was nice, though. The videos at LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda) are outdated for Unreal, but deeper than tutorials, and useful for basic game creation knowledge and parallel skills like 3D modeling software.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  Like you said, things get deprecated or replaced really frequently with engines. I think if anyone were to write a book for any of the major engines, it would be partially out-of-date by the time writing was finished. There are some books out there, but they're all very behind compared to current release versions.
  - chefandy 4y ago
    Yep. I was seeing books released in 2020 when I was looking in early 2022 and they were already outdated enough to be less useful than a handful of youtube videos.
- chefandy 4y ago
  Ha... I clearly responded to the wrong comment.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  While not about specific engines, I am quite sure that there is enough literature about "how to build your own engine", as I have enough of them on my bookshelf since MS-DOS days. These were my first two books on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Game-Programming-Gurus-Andre-Lamothe/dp/0672305070 https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Game-Programming-Gurus-Andre-L... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-3D-Game-Engine-C/dp/0471123269 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-3D-Game-Engine-C/dp/047112... So I imagine a local library or bookstore might have some dusty books from Andre Lamothe, Game Development Gems book series, and whatever else came after.
  - chefandy 4y ago
    You've clearly never used a modern game engine; things have changed a lot in the past 20 years. Using a modern game engine and building a game engine are as different as building your own car and driving, or even designing a digital camera and being a fine art photographer. Both go really deep, but in entirely different directions. There probably isn't even a statistically significant overlap between people who are great at one being great at the other. The people designing and assembling the high-level logic for Zelda Breath of The Wild, for example, would get absolutely no use out of knowing how to build a game engine, and that's a good thing. When it comes to the way the game works from a player perspective, the underlying implementation details are invisible. Studios employ game engine engineers for a reason and they're not really using the engine. They're using code to make tools that other people use in the engine.

by prox 4y ago

chefandy 4y ago

I'm currently in a game design undergrad program and was surprised to see how few books are published about specific engines. I'm not positive, but I reckon it was historically a niche domain that changed constantly because it closely followed bleeding edge hardware, and until recently, was mostly proprietary. Just yesterday, a knowledgeable, experienced instructor decided to switch from using Unreal Engine 5.0.3 to 5.1 in class only to find the well-established system for some basic game parameters was deprecated. Game development also requires non-trivial base knowledge about a broad range of topics, i.e. 3D meshes, materials, rigging, lighting, and/or 2D animation, UI concepts, some audio stuff, knowing how event-based programming works, generally, etc. Gaging base knowledge might be difficult! Most people don't need to, or event want to understand the whole huge thing to work on their projects... So even among those interested that's still a tough sell. It would bother me less if the documentation was better. Even in Unreal Engine many of the entries in the API docs are generated from whatever sparse comments are in the engine code. It seems like the standard way to learn these things is to either be motivated enough to stumble around for a few years using tutorials, YouTube videos, overly terse official docs, and reading engine code, or learning from someone who already knows what they're doing, either at a university or on the job. I am pretty green though, so I may be making some faulty assumptions. I've found forcing myself to learn Unreal's Blueprint system taught me more about game development in general than bigger projects in Godot because Unreal is so much more opinionated, but you can pretty easily dig into the mechanics. Godot being so close to Python was nice, though. The videos at LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda) are outdated for Unreal, but deeper than tutorials, and useful for basic game creation knowledge and parallel skills like 3D modeling software.

squeaky-clean 4y ago
Like you said, things get deprecated or replaced really frequently with engines. I think if anyone were to write a book for any of the major engines, it would be partially out-of-date by the time writing was finished. There are some books out there, but they're all very behind compared to current release versions.
- chefandy 4y ago
  Yep. I was seeing books released in 2020 when I was looking in early 2022 and they were already outdated enough to be less useful than a handful of youtube videos.
chefandy 4y ago
Ha... I clearly responded to the wrong comment.
pjmlp 4y ago
While not about specific engines, I am quite sure that there is enough literature about "how to build your own engine", as I have enough of them on my bookshelf since MS-DOS days. These were my first two books on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Game-Programming-Gurus-Andre-Lamothe/dp/0672305070 https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Game-Programming-Gurus-Andre-L... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-3D-Game-Engine-C/dp/0471123269 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-3D-Game-Engine-C/dp/047112... So I imagine a local library or bookstore might have some dusty books from Andre Lamothe, Game Development Gems book series, and whatever else came after.
- chefandy 4y ago
  You've clearly never used a modern game engine; things have changed a lot in the past 20 years. Using a modern game engine and building a game engine are as different as building your own car and driving, or even designing a digital camera and being a fine art photographer. Both go really deep, but in entirely different directions. There probably isn't even a statistically significant overlap between people who are great at one being great at the other. The people designing and assembling the high-level logic for Zelda Breath of The Wild, for example, would get absolutely no use out of knowing how to build a game engine, and that's a good thing. When it comes to the way the game works from a player perspective, the underlying implementation details are invisible. Studios employ game engine engineers for a reason and they're not really using the engine. They're using code to make tools that other people use in the engine.