5 ms·

The dev is a person from Indonesia (Rizky Nova) who's device has 16GB of ram. Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This cou

by culi 4mo ago

The dev is a person from Indonesia (Rizky Nova) who's device has 16GB of ram. Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.

101008 4mo ago
I think this is incredible, and I am so happy for him, he deserves all the praise he gets (and maybe more). I will sin and make this about me, briefly, but just to say that when I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer, a) I enjoyed coding much more, b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter. I miss those times.
- ffsm8 4mo ago
  Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Removing them is what's difficult - so why don't you add them back if it makes you a better programmer and you enjoy doing it more? Personally, I think the reason you enjoyed it more as a teenager is just down to the fact you were fully in control of what to do and had no external pressure to earn money etc, so if anything you had less constraints - at least from my point of view
  - rablackburn 4mo ago
    > Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;) There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off
    - vitorfblima 4mo ago
      Smoking and eating unhealthy food are constraints to life! ;)
      - harvey9 3mo ago
        Over a much longer time horizon than trying to run Doom on a ZX Spectrum.
  - close04 4mo ago
    > nothing is easier then adding constraints What's easier is removing the constraints you just added artificially. Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints. > so why don't you add them back The reason the proverb says "necessity is the mother of invention" is because "desire" is usually not enough to drive it. It's easy to take the hard road when you're forced onto it, but very hard to choose it when there's an easy alternative.
    - embedding-shape 4mo ago
      > Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints. Why not? Who cares how/why they're there, as long as you follow the constraints, regardless of how easy they are to remove, they're still there. I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. "Ok, now I can only use this filter for any sound shaping", or "Make a song using only instruments outputting mono", or "Maximum 10 cables to make a new sound on the modular synth" or whatever. Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
      - close04 4mo ago
        > Who cares how/why they're there The people who face them. The constraints are making the goal harder to reach. The goal is on the other side of the constraints and it takes power of will to refuse to remove them and keep pushing. This forces a different, slower, more difficult to reach solution. > when stuck creatively in music production So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the means to reach the solution faster. > Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot. When you remove these you're stuck in a creativity block and failed to achieve your goal. When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach. It's a matter of perspective and what you want to achieve. You wouldn't want a long road through the mountains as your daily commute but it's probably lovely as a hike. The only way to make the problems comparable is to set a programming goal of "write the most efficient code to do X" but for real work the goal is almost always "do X".
  - QuantumGood 4mo ago
    Simple and easy are often conflated a bit, but measured by outcomes, are quite different. Comments offerring humorous parallels of common simple and easy conflations will follow.
    - ffsm8 4mo ago
      That's true, I just wanted to maybe add a new perspective to 101008 view that if he enjoyed working with technical constraints, he can still target eg embedded systems with massive resource constraints - and also to force an acknowledgement that the reason for his likely nostalgia to this kind of coding is likely more related to the mental freedom he enjoyed while working back then ... Because that too can be done, albeit with the caveat of time constraints because life doesn't go away no matter how much someone may want it to.
  - kromokromo 4mo ago
    Which is often the case in music too actually. So many famous artists and bands created their best work early in their careers. You would think touring and several albums make them perfect the craft of making songs, but I think involving money and external pressure actually kill the creative spark if you’re not mindful about it.
    - lc9er 4mo ago
      Those early albums often consist of material that was basically battle-hardened by the time it reached the studio. Bands early in their career often spend lots of time all in the same room, writing songs together then do lots of playing for small crowds, where they get a very up close feel for the audience response. Material that doesn’t go over well with band mates and audiences gets dropped. With the industry’s album release cycle, bands are often under time pressure to cut a new album, so they end up writing in the studio, each person laying down tracks individually, and missing out on all the feedback of earlier iterations.
    - picofarad 4mo ago
      I wrote about 10 albums and my music generally got better over time, but I just stopped writing because I had children; also less time for creativity with a family. If I were forced to write music, now, for money or whatever, it would be bad music.
  - myself248 4mo ago
    > Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Technically it's easy. Mentally it's nearly impossible. This comment posted on Ars yesterday blew my mind: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-become-idiots-the-ai-cheating-scandal-roiling-brown-university/?comments=1&comments-page=1#comments https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-becom... tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.
  - rlpb 4mo ago
    Adding contraints makes it take longer to deliver a result. I probably cannot install today's engines SDKs and related tooling for example. I'd have to write my own. Doable, and would make me a better programmer, but you won't see results for a long time. As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.
  - wvh 4mo ago
    Because the software industry doesn't pay anymore for constraints or doing things "the hard way". Everything is high-level language and by tomorrow. The day after it doesn't exist anymore anyway. I'd wish to get a project that's low-level, multi-year and high quality of engineering and longevity. Make the best you can – something to be proud of.
- 21asdffdsa12 4mo ago
  And that is why gamedevs do not get machine-upgrades
- patates 4mo ago
  > I will sin and make this about me (continues to make an awesome, general point about engineering) :)
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  I enjoy going back to basics every once in a while; do Arduino / embedded programming on a shitty netbook (it came with Windows but it has only 32GB of storage so it couldn't even update), build games / stuff in Pico-8, start a new Go project with just the main toolkit, etc.
- arizen 4mo ago
  Yes, true creativity usually or mostly comes from real constraints, in my experience. As, if there are no constraints in some specific area, there is no kinda "survival need" to improve there, hence brain is not working as hard/smart/deep as it could.
- haritha-j 4mo ago
  I feel exactly the same way. Though one extra factor is that I feel like my time was so pure back then. Now, with multiple degrees, I keep thinking about weird concepts like 'opportunity cost'. There was no opportunity cost when I was a kid. There was just time. Bucketloads of it!
- lou1306 4mo ago
  Re: making things about me (but also kind of related), I am working on a project that requires sending encrypted telemetry data from a Crazyflie drone (so, STM32) and it's such a fun experience. Each telemetry payload is just 26B so I had to get creative, write down packet diagrams and then make it work in C. An AI agent helps a bit with some stuff but you're mostly on your own. In general I highly recommend going the embedded/IoT way if you look for challenges and constraints.
bdickason 4mo ago
Very cool to see an Indonesian dev on the homepage of HN!
ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
> Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome ... and paying Epic 5% of all lifetime profit is a blessing too (if he makes money appropriate for "the best train sim ever made")
- klntsky 4mo ago
  That is fair for something that makes the game possible in the first place.
- mouse-5346 4mo ago
  I mean, if he makes a boatload of money then it's fine if a fraction of it goes to the engine. When his immediate needs are met, he can choose to either stay with unreal or move to an alternative later on without cost pressures.
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  Unreal devs have bills to pay as well. We already know what happens in Nebraska.
  - jraby3 4mo ago
    What happens in Nebraska?!?
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      xkcd has the answer.
  - ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
    I doubt Epic struggles for money. By the way what happens in Nebraska?
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      It is also not a charity, it is a business. xkcd has the answer.
ColdStream 4mo ago
I have said it for a few years now. If Epic ever decided to go public on the stock market, I would throw a significant amount of my savings at them. Their technology is astounding. Yes, some games have some issues but it really seems like that is a problem of developers not knowing when to say 'No!' to the giant tool kit they have been provided.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  I'm not sure myself, as there's Epic the ligitous games company that wants more money from Fortnite, Epic the attempted digital games platform whose main userbase just claims a free game once every two weeks, and Epic the engine company. I have more faith in Epic the engine company than the other Epics.
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    And then Epic, the medical records company? Oh man!
- hackable_sand 4mo ago
  That sets off alarm bells for me.
csande17 4mo ago
Unreal Engine's been free for just over 11 years now: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free
- rob74 4mo ago
  If you think about how much time a single developer has to invest to create all the assets for such a massive game, 11 years doesn't sound like a lot of time... (assuming he did all the assets himself and didn't use AI, which might be a bit naive)
  - epolanski 4mo ago
    Apparently he was into 3d-modeling since 11 years old, he got into programming later.
ianbooker 4mo ago
> This couldn't have happened 10 years ago. I agree. Something similar could have happened 30 years ago, and it did, see Transport Tycoon (or a lot of early games). But from 2000 to 2020?
- p-e-w 4mo ago
  The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    > with no meaningful alternative Steam (which I'm guessing you're talking about) is nowhere close of being a monopoly. There are loads of alternatives out there, in wide use by people already. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox and more are all examples of big time successful games that never been available on Steam.
    - LadyCailin 4mo ago
      I would even go further, and say that this logic applies not just for massive games from massive publishers, but platforms like GoG works well as an alternative for indies.
      - simoncion 4mo ago
        Plus, consider the software distribution situation in the pre-Internet world. There was getting someone to arrange for very-limited-time distribution in physical stores (and paying out the ass for the privilege), or paying to advertise your mail-order distribution, or encouraging BBS operators to distribute your shareware that includes a "Mail $AMOUNT to this address and we'll mail you a full copy." message inside. Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day. There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute. If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud. Alas.
hjkl0 4mo ago
Out of curiosity, what is the significance of the 16GB of RAM?
- high_priest 4mo ago
  In development, you don't have the privilege of using optimised culling and LODs. For rapid development, very little code is compiled & there are extra IDE tools running. When you consider that 16GB has become the minimum requirement for modern A+ titles (with the Windows OS & background tasks squating on 4-6GB). Creating such a title might be difficult on memory limited machine. Unreal had made some improvements in this regard recently, with direct from storage assets loading & stuff.
- pelagicAustral 4mo ago
  I can tell you right now, from an M5 with 16 GB of RAM, I'd be hard pressed to squeeze a bit of ram for a game of sodoku if I'm already running an Android emulator plus a few IDEs and 10 tabs in Chrome... Being able to produce something of note, especially in the gaming space, with 16 GB of ram IS a feat in and of itself
inigyou 4mo ago
Wouldn't they have used Unity 10 years ago?
wolvoleo 4mo ago
Oh not even from Japan? I just assumed he's from there because that's what the game is about

by culi 4mo ago

The dev is a person from Indonesia (Rizky Nova) who's device has 16GB of ram. Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.

101008 4mo ago

I think this is incredible, and I am so happy for him, he deserves all the praise he gets (and maybe more). I will sin and make this about me, briefly, but just to say that when I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer, a) I enjoyed coding much more, b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter. I miss those times.

ffsm8 4mo ago
Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Removing them is what's difficult - so why don't you add them back if it makes you a better programmer and you enjoy doing it more? Personally, I think the reason you enjoyed it more as a teenager is just down to the fact you were fully in control of what to do and had no external pressure to earn money etc, so if anything you had less constraints - at least from my point of view
- rablackburn 4mo ago
  > Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;) There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off
  - vitorfblima 4mo ago
    Smoking and eating unhealthy food are constraints to life! ;)
    - harvey9 3mo ago
      Over a much longer time horizon than trying to run Doom on a ZX Spectrum.
- close04 4mo ago
  > nothing is easier then adding constraints What's easier is removing the constraints you just added artificially. Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints. > so why don't you add them back The reason the proverb says "necessity is the mother of invention" is because "desire" is usually not enough to drive it. It's easy to take the hard road when you're forced onto it, but very hard to choose it when there's an easy alternative.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    > Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints. Why not? Who cares how/why they're there, as long as you follow the constraints, regardless of how easy they are to remove, they're still there. I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. "Ok, now I can only use this filter for any sound shaping", or "Make a song using only instruments outputting mono", or "Maximum 10 cables to make a new sound on the modular synth" or whatever. Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
    - close04 4mo ago
      > Who cares how/why they're there The people who face them. The constraints are making the goal harder to reach. The goal is on the other side of the constraints and it takes power of will to refuse to remove them and keep pushing. This forces a different, slower, more difficult to reach solution. > when stuck creatively in music production So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the means to reach the solution faster. > Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot. When you remove these you're stuck in a creativity block and failed to achieve your goal. When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach. It's a matter of perspective and what you want to achieve. You wouldn't want a long road through the mountains as your daily commute but it's probably lovely as a hike. The only way to make the problems comparable is to set a programming goal of "write the most efficient code to do X" but for real work the goal is almost always "do X".
- QuantumGood 4mo ago
  Simple and easy are often conflated a bit, but measured by outcomes, are quite different. Comments offerring humorous parallels of common simple and easy conflations will follow.
  - ffsm8 4mo ago
    That's true, I just wanted to maybe add a new perspective to 101008 view that if he enjoyed working with technical constraints, he can still target eg embedded systems with massive resource constraints - and also to force an acknowledgement that the reason for his likely nostalgia to this kind of coding is likely more related to the mental freedom he enjoyed while working back then ... Because that too can be done, albeit with the caveat of time constraints because life doesn't go away no matter how much someone may want it to.
- kromokromo 4mo ago
  Which is often the case in music too actually. So many famous artists and bands created their best work early in their careers. You would think touring and several albums make them perfect the craft of making songs, but I think involving money and external pressure actually kill the creative spark if you’re not mindful about it.
  - lc9er 4mo ago
    Those early albums often consist of material that was basically battle-hardened by the time it reached the studio. Bands early in their career often spend lots of time all in the same room, writing songs together then do lots of playing for small crowds, where they get a very up close feel for the audience response. Material that doesn’t go over well with band mates and audiences gets dropped. With the industry’s album release cycle, bands are often under time pressure to cut a new album, so they end up writing in the studio, each person laying down tracks individually, and missing out on all the feedback of earlier iterations.
  - picofarad 4mo ago
    I wrote about 10 albums and my music generally got better over time, but I just stopped writing because I had children; also less time for creativity with a family. If I were forced to write music, now, for money or whatever, it would be bad music.
- myself248 4mo ago
  > Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Technically it's easy. Mentally it's nearly impossible. This comment posted on Ars yesterday blew my mind: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-become-idiots-the-ai-cheating-scandal-roiling-brown-university/?comments=1&comments-page=1#comments https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-becom... tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.
- rlpb 4mo ago
  Adding contraints makes it take longer to deliver a result. I probably cannot install today's engines SDKs and related tooling for example. I'd have to write my own. Doable, and would make me a better programmer, but you won't see results for a long time. As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.
- wvh 4mo ago
  Because the software industry doesn't pay anymore for constraints or doing things "the hard way". Everything is high-level language and by tomorrow. The day after it doesn't exist anymore anyway. I'd wish to get a project that's low-level, multi-year and high quality of engineering and longevity. Make the best you can – something to be proud of.
21asdffdsa12 4mo ago
And that is why gamedevs do not get machine-upgrades
patates 4mo ago
> I will sin and make this about me (continues to make an awesome, general point about engineering) :)
Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
I enjoy going back to basics every once in a while; do Arduino / embedded programming on a shitty netbook (it came with Windows but it has only 32GB of storage so it couldn't even update), build games / stuff in Pico-8, start a new Go project with just the main toolkit, etc.
arizen 4mo ago
Yes, true creativity usually or mostly comes from real constraints, in my experience. As, if there are no constraints in some specific area, there is no kinda "survival need" to improve there, hence brain is not working as hard/smart/deep as it could.
haritha-j 4mo ago
I feel exactly the same way. Though one extra factor is that I feel like my time was so pure back then. Now, with multiple degrees, I keep thinking about weird concepts like 'opportunity cost'. There was no opportunity cost when I was a kid. There was just time. Bucketloads of it!
lou1306 4mo ago
Re: making things about me (but also kind of related), I am working on a project that requires sending encrypted telemetry data from a Crazyflie drone (so, STM32) and it's such a fun experience. Each telemetry payload is just 26B so I had to get creative, write down packet diagrams and then make it work in C. An AI agent helps a bit with some stuff but you're mostly on your own. In general I highly recommend going the embedded/IoT way if you look for challenges and constraints.

bdickason 4mo ago

Very cool to see an Indonesian dev on the homepage of HN!

ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago

> Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome ... and paying Epic 5% of all lifetime profit is a blessing too (if he makes money appropriate for "the best train sim ever made")

klntsky 4mo ago
That is fair for something that makes the game possible in the first place.
mouse-5346 4mo ago
I mean, if he makes a boatload of money then it's fine if a fraction of it goes to the engine. When his immediate needs are met, he can choose to either stay with unreal or move to an alternative later on without cost pressures.
pjmlp 4mo ago
Unreal devs have bills to pay as well. We already know what happens in Nebraska.
- jraby3 4mo ago
  What happens in Nebraska?!?
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    xkcd has the answer.
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
  I doubt Epic struggles for money. By the way what happens in Nebraska?
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    It is also not a charity, it is a business. xkcd has the answer.

ColdStream 4mo ago

I have said it for a few years now. If Epic ever decided to go public on the stock market, I would throw a significant amount of my savings at them. Their technology is astounding. Yes, some games have some issues but it really seems like that is a problem of developers not knowing when to say 'No!' to the giant tool kit they have been provided.

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
I'm not sure myself, as there's Epic the ligitous games company that wants more money from Fortnite, Epic the attempted digital games platform whose main userbase just claims a free game once every two weeks, and Epic the engine company. I have more faith in Epic the engine company than the other Epics.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  And then Epic, the medical records company? Oh man!
hackable_sand 4mo ago
That sets off alarm bells for me.

csande17 4mo ago

Unreal Engine's been free for just over 11 years now: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

rob74 4mo ago
If you think about how much time a single developer has to invest to create all the assets for such a massive game, 11 years doesn't sound like a lot of time... (assuming he did all the assets himself and didn't use AI, which might be a bit naive)
- epolanski 4mo ago
  Apparently he was into 3d-modeling since 11 years old, he got into programming later.

ianbooker 4mo ago

> This couldn't have happened 10 years ago. I agree. Something similar could have happened 30 years ago, and it did, see Transport Tycoon (or a lot of early games). But from 2000 to 2020?

p-e-w 4mo ago
The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > with no meaningful alternative Steam (which I'm guessing you're talking about) is nowhere close of being a monopoly. There are loads of alternatives out there, in wide use by people already. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox and more are all examples of big time successful games that never been available on Steam.
  - LadyCailin 4mo ago
    I would even go further, and say that this logic applies not just for massive games from massive publishers, but platforms like GoG works well as an alternative for indies.
    - simoncion 4mo ago
      Plus, consider the software distribution situation in the pre-Internet world. There was getting someone to arrange for very-limited-time distribution in physical stores (and paying out the ass for the privilege), or paying to advertise your mail-order distribution, or encouraging BBS operators to distribute your shareware that includes a "Mail $AMOUNT to this address and we'll mail you a full copy." message inside. Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day. There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute. If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud. Alas.

hjkl0 4mo ago

Out of curiosity, what is the significance of the 16GB of RAM?

high_priest 4mo ago
In development, you don't have the privilege of using optimised culling and LODs. For rapid development, very little code is compiled & there are extra IDE tools running. When you consider that 16GB has become the minimum requirement for modern A+ titles (with the Windows OS & background tasks squating on 4-6GB). Creating such a title might be difficult on memory limited machine. Unreal had made some improvements in this regard recently, with direct from storage assets loading & stuff.
pelagicAustral 4mo ago
I can tell you right now, from an M5 with 16 GB of RAM, I'd be hard pressed to squeeze a bit of ram for a game of sodoku if I'm already running an Android emulator plus a few IDEs and 10 tabs in Chrome... Being able to produce something of note, especially in the gaming space, with 16 GB of ram IS a feat in and of itself

inigyou 4mo ago

Wouldn't they have used Unity 10 years ago?

wolvoleo 4mo ago

Oh not even from Japan? I just assumed he's from there because that's what the game is about