Why I left Unity

1. We don't re-invent everything, but the hardware keeps getting better and we want to take advantage of it. To do so requires rewriting large portions of code. It is only because the basic hardware capabilities everyone has these days are pretty good, that using an engine not designed for your game has become so much more viable. Previously you'd build the engine to fit the game in order to get the performance you expect.

Shader's for example went through a massive upheaval when we changed from fixed function to custom, and now compute shaders have changed things again. Additionally there are always new algorithms presented each year which produce better results, which we must have!

2. Code that works well in an event based system does not necessarily work well when you are running it 60 times a second. This is why companies sometimes go in and replace standard functionality. We don't want to, but to get the speed everyone expects, we have to.

3. Models, textures, animations, dialog and so on are data, which the computer doesn't really understand. Where we see a person it sees a triangle mesh, or where we see signs of a bloody battle it just sees red pixels. This semantic mismatch is the biggest problem in the industry today, and makes re-usability incredibly hard. Manpower is usually the only way to overcome this, with people spending months on a single character model. Additionally better tools are always welcome but the industry has stalemated a bit in this regard.

Generally animation is still best imported from real life, EA for example have an entire building devoted to just motion capture [1] with over 100 cameras.

4. Many old games are still available on GOG and other websites, so these companies still make money from them which likely influences their decision to not release source code. Console games also are restricted by proprietary console-only APIs.

[1] http://www.capturelab.com/about-us

Hacker News does this all the time: take something that's on a person's personal website/blog that might be intended for a limited or self-selecting audience, or meant as a joke or off-the-cuff remark and blow it way out of proportion.

This isn't actually a thing at all. All the id games still sell like hotcakes moreso now, because of the open source engines that keep those games modern and have dramatically improved over the originals (check out Brutal Doom for an example).

Even if your engines and your art assets are liberated, you still do not have a complete game without maps. And while the user community built up around your product would certainly make their own, the fact they are all created on the basis of your game would, almost always, drive dramatically more long-tail sales to just play your original maps that inspired an entire ecosystem than locking up the complete package to rot in video game obscurity like the thousands of Playstation 2 games are doing now.

More convenient for basics, yes, but more varied and fancy?

>As for culture the popular parts of Seattle are as homogenous as Portland, and Bellevue at least has a sizable immigrant population from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. But yes, Bellevue is not the most happening place in the world.

Yeah that. By culturally I meant places to visit and things to do (concerts, book readings, stage plays, parties, gatherings, etc), not just having neighbors of different origins one will usually seldom interact with.