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by jordand15 hours ago |
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upvoteby nxobject1 hours ago|
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Around the time Mantle/Vulkan-type APIs entered the scene, I ended up hearing a lot of "yes, these APIs much more complicated to use, but fewer people need to touch D3D/your graphics API anymore with these freely available engines." Was my impression correct?
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upvoteby MisterTea15 hours ago|
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> Technology is sadly increasingly homogenising around Unreal Engine 5

I kinda get the commodification of games engines and Unreal. I am sure a lot of us saw the gaming revolution unfold, watching gaming companies one-up each other in graphics and interactivity. But once you get to the point of UE5, Unity, or Godot there is little need or value to make a game engine from scratch anymore.

Don't get me wrong, if you want to write an engine, go for it. But if you just want to make a game then an existing engine is good enough.

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upvoteby Jtarii15 hours ago|
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If everyone stops writing game engines then who is going to program unreal engine/unity/godot?
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upvoteby bunderbunder15 hours ago|
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I’ll admit I lost the plot a long time ago, but there’s a part of me that wonders if the main purpose behind the game engine and graphics card treadmill is to line the pockets of people who sell games engines and graphics cards. My subjective sense of the connection between technology and enjoyment as a player started to degrade about a decade back.
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upvoteby Jtarii14 hours ago|
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I think it was just studios competing with each other in the 2010s to see who could make the biggest most ambitious game worlds. Leading to ballooning dev costs and then a feedback loop of higher production costs leading to safer design decisions.

There was also a heavy emphasis on games being "cinematic" which necessitates photorealistic rendering.

AAA games have been pretty artless for a while now baring a couple exceptions.

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upvoteby bunderbunder12 hours ago|
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It’s especially the “cinematic” bit that got me. It’s technically impressive, but isn’t as visually interesting as what lower budget games have been doing with less polygons and more inspiration.
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upvoteby alpaca12814 hours ago|
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I'd it's more a convenient outcome of maximizing profits than premeditated. Not optimizing is cheaper for studios while Nvidia doesn't mind extra popularity for their DLSS feature.

Crysis 3 is over a decade old, still looks great and ran on hardware that wouldn't suffice for web browsing today. I haven't seen anything in games since then that justified a significant increase in system requirements.

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upvoteby ses19846 hours ago|
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What about hardware that could run crysis3 wouldn’t suffice for web browsing?
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upvoteby lelanthran4 hours ago|
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Well, it ran on my 9600GT, which I used in a desktop from 2016 and recently used that desktop with 16GB RAM for the last few weeks.

I was unable to see any site that used webgl, which is almost all games site and many charting and graphing apps.

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upvoteby immibis213 hours ago|
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The people working for Unreal/Unity/Godot. Nobody writes search engines any more - except for Google et al. Nobody writes advertising systems - except for all the advertising businesses.
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upvoteby fasterik13 hours ago|
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Games are a bit different in that the game engine is a core part of the product. There aren't many projects with $100M budgets building directly on top of a search engine. A lot of small and medium sized companies will use off the shelf game engines, but you'll never see Rockstar switching over to Unity/Unreal.
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upvoteby Jtarii12 hours ago|
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Okay, but google search has only gotten worse for decades.

So your argument is that game engines will just decay.

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upvoteby Emjayen11 hours ago|
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Not unique to gamedev; during the boom at the turn of the millennium the bar to entry to programming was dropped on the floor to fill demand.

The vast majority of programmers today don't even understand the basics of how-computer-work - not just microarchitecural considerations but even how to interface with the kernel efficiently / understand the performance considerations of their target platform.

Ask your average programmer how to say, simply perform I/O efficiently as possible on NT given some workload characteristics. One needs to first understand this before they can begin making concessions in favour of other demands (abstraction, flexibility, ect) and very few programmers can even get beyond the starting line.

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