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Comment by RoboTeddy | Hacker News Reader

Sheesh. How many engineer-hours have gone into Unreal?

A hell of a lot, the engine itself was in development for around three years IIRC

And that was from 1995 to 1998. It's had a lot of energy spent on it since then. It's an incredible piece of tech.

According to the Wikipedia page at least, even just the current version (Unreal Engine 4) has been in development for 14 years now! With 2003-2008 apparently being just Tim Sweeney.

I have high expectations from simulation. I hope they will be able to reach 99.9% realism so we can use it to recreate any situation we want, for fun (games) and profit (pre-training robots).

<rant>Self driving cars already train on simulated roads because that allows the creation of any scenario. Even human pilots use simulators to train, especially for those rare situations. And since robot training is expensive and slow in the real world, the only alternative is to do it in a sim.

Simulation allows the composition of any scene that might be very hard to record in the wild - for example, an octopus sitting as a hat on the head of an elephant... where would you be able to get that photo? but surely you imagined it in 0.1 seconds, using your imagination - a powerful simulator humans have in their heads. Such images are crucial in training AI.

I think AI will reach human level when it will be equipped with a sandbox where it can try out its ideas and concepts, similarly to how scientists use labs to test their theories. When AI gets its world simulator, it will be able to learn reasoning and meaning that is grounded in verification. Just like us. We have the world itself as our fundamental "simulator" and experiment on it to learn physics, biology and AI. AI needs a simulator too.</>

Cool, but what does this have to do with the comment you replied to?

Remember that the people who worked on the engine for three years also have years and years and years of experience prior to this.

Which is why there is the games industry saying that one either builds an engine or a game.

Also why commercial game developers usually don't whine about 3D APIs like FOSS indie devs do.

Adding support for yet another graphics backend is a trivial task, compared to the overall feature set of a game engine.

The engine has engineering effort in it since the late 1990's since some of the code is that old. (I say this because I remember learning from the mod SDK back in the day, and I've looked into what it is now). So almost 2 decades worth of engineering effort has gone into it. Granted a bunch of that effort has been in rewriting systems which needed to be updated (like rendering).

an unreal amount?

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