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Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

I would hazard that game engines are an order of magnitude more complex than web frameworks. A better analogy may be game engine vs db engine or web framework+runtime(ex: Erlang/Elixir+Phoenix). If you have performance issues with a web framework you can scale it horizontally to a degree(depending on downstream dependencies like your DB). Games are built to run against resource constrained hardware and so they optimize for specific usage patterns.

There's also the issue that most engines are built to be good at a specific game type and may make trade-offs in terms of how assets are managed and scene complexity. An open-world has much more different requirements than an on-rails shooter. For instance I had to do some pretty heavy retrofitting of one of those engines to handle LoD/geometry streaming and a bunch of other optimizations to make them work well with a large sight-distance game.

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I’d go an order of complexity above again. The real comparison is to the browser, particularly for general purpose engines like Unreal and Unity. I’d hazard most game engine teams are bigger than most browser teams.

I disagree. Modern web browsers are the most complicated pieces of technology we have today. The amount of work that goes into sandboxing and security alone probably eclipses the complexity of game engines.

That seems very optimistic when compared to some of the bigger engineering projects we have going as humanity. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines as a whole system (including the multiple computer networks and their software) are much more complex than browsers, to say nothing of one-offs like the ISS (lots of cutting edge hardware but also full of software) and the systems controlling modern factories. Browsers don't even come close.

I think it's kind of hard to quantify complexity in a way that compares nicely across domains. For example, a lot of the complexity in a browser comes from needing to service ~billions of users across thousands of devices using loosely implemented standards. This is quite a different problem to building an aircraft carrier, where you're going to run in to hard engineering and physics problems but you only have to target ~10k well trained users.

Web frameworks are nowhere near as complicated as browsers

I’d go an order of complexity above again.

Not when you start. While UE5 is no doubt orders of magnitude more complex than any web framework, no one sets out to write UE5. In fact most people start writing their own game engine because they want something a lot less complex and more tailored than what is available.

If you have the right background knocking out a very simple game engine isn't hard. Many people do it as part of a university course. The problem is that your 'simple' game engine ends up being not that simple very quickly once you start adding features.

Right which is why in the following sentence I limit it to general purpose game engines like Unreal and Unity.

Making a toy browser is something you can do as well.

Yea, my point was related to why people so often write their own game engine (and so rarely write their own browser). Writing your own game engine for your own game looks fun and easy from the outset. And in fact, depending on your game, writing a game engine that lets you ship that one game doesn't even have to be complex.

Right but there are smaller scale browser-like things as well which have a more vibrant DIY scene like Gopher, Gemini and so on. We shouldn't take a narrow view on what a browser is if we're not going to do that for a game engine.

Depends on the game engine, most 2D ones are quite comparable.

No no, browser contain components similar to a game engine, browser are way more complex, and frustrating, because you do not control the specs.

Depends on what the game engine X and Web Framework Y are trying to achieve.

That's true, but you can see new open source engines rising becoming a serious choice to make games. Not so much for web browsers.

Depends on the motivation and how much of ChromeOS one wants to implement.

https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1508953394836353024

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