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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

> The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers.

I remember reading an interview with a well known person in the 3D and gaming industry in a gaming magazine well over a decade ago. I can barley recall the details but one thing that stuck out was the interviewer asked why couldn't the game engine be the API giving the developers higher level tools instead of OpenGL or direct 3d, as well as audio, input and others. The answer was that game engines were too focused and not flexible enough to be used as a kitted API.

Fast forward to today and that is exactly what Unreal and Unity have achieved. They built game engines that are flexible enough to be complete tool kits to build other games. Interesting to see how far we have progressed.

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This is at least in part because hardware has advanced to the point that for many games it makes sense to optimize for development time over runtime performance. Unity and Unreal are still not as performant as a well optimized specialized engine could be in many situations but it would probably take too long and cost too much to build that specialized engine.

There are also trade offs in flexibility that come with using Unity or Unreal. They make it easy to make games that fit within their paradigms but it's relatively harder to make a game that does something radical or experimental with rendering or physics.

I say this as someone who lives in Unity. It's absolutely the right choice in many situations but it's not without tradeoffs and compromises.

I love the productivity Unity brings, but sometimes I feel like making a game in the engine requires extra polish as I need to make sure the game has character and not “a Unity game”.

I've found that the polish step is necessary no matter what engine you use, or even if you roll your own.

It is a cliche of game development that a game that is 75% there still has 90% of the work left to complete it to high quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

It is a cliche of all software development, and very true in my experience.

Is it a cliche if it's true? The difference between some slapped together product and one that feels decent is layer after layer of detail and polish. Long after you feel that you've put forth a reasonable effort, you still have half of the development left to go.

I 100% agree, although I feel like I get better value for my polish effort using a different toolset.

Another reason is change of generations.

Many old style AAA developers see using off the shelf middleware as heresy.

This has not been my experience. Game developers I've worked with have generally been pragmatic and willing to use the best tool for the job.

Also triple AAA isn't that old! There's not a generation retiring quite yet :) People who want to still be in the industry are. I've seen the industry get older on average as I've worked in it.

Forms of middleware have been there since the early days of AAA style games - sound, video encoding etc. such as RAD Game Tools

Just speaking of the regular reasons I used to see on Gamasutra or GDC talks about creating the own engine in-house instead of commercial middleware

If I recall correctly, Tribes was one of the first ones to have some moderate adoption.

Can you give some examples? I had worked on many games and a licensed engine had been always evaluated. Some went with one, some did not for technical and economical reasons. Never seen people just outright declining it because it's "heresy".

Things were already moving in that direction though. Many games used Doom / Quake / etc engines in the 90s

I think the turning point came when the work to write a new engine became greater than the work to use an off the shelf and make it your own. And that only came about as people's expectations for physics, lighting, etc got pushed ever more.

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