Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

allarsblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 117 posts

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#11

Post by icefox »

georgeecollins wrote: post #3

The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…

So the question would be what type of game could be made with that type of team today?

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#12

Post by wyldfire »

> They immediately asked who was giving up this information and wanted to crack down on this perceived insubordination, rather than trying to address the issue. I was then dismissed for not specifying names, and my services were no longer required.

Wow! That sounds terrible.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#13

Post by klodolph »

icefox wrote: post #11
georgeecollins wrote: post #3

The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…

So the question would be what type of game could be made with that type of team today?

There are still great people working in the games industry, but it's larger and segmented. These days you can be an engine programmer working on e.g. Frostbite or id Tech for EA and ZeniMax, respectively. These have resulted in games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Doom (2016). Dragon Age: Inquisition required a lot of engine work because Frostbite was originally designed for first-person shooters like Battlefield, and Doom is a bit of a technological marvel, and it's kind of a showcase piece for id Tech 6.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#14

Post by pjc50 »

wyldfire wrote: post #12

> They immediately asked who was giving up this information and wanted to crack down on this perceived insubordination, rather than trying to address the issue. I was then dismissed for not specifying names, and my services were no longer required. Wow! That sounds terrible.

This is horribly routine in all hierarchical organisations across the world; those that manage to escape from it usually become runaway successes.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#15

Post by lkrubner »

About this:

“responsibilities than they can handle, and development suffers from this person being fatigued, or worse, leaving altogether. Neither the engineer nor team can grow because of this, as new features or changes get increasingly more resource-demanding to implement”

This is said about mid-level engineers who burn out, but I think it happens to senior level engineers as well.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#16

Post by MisterTea »

georgeecollins wrote: post #3

The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…

> 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.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#17

Post by ythn »

georgeecollins wrote: post #3

The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…

> Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible.

Such as mountains of bloatware/shovelware template games clogging up every single online store and platform.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#18

Post by mattnewport »

MisterTea wrote: post #16
georgeecollins wrote: post #3

The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…

> 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 dir…

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.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#19

Post by andybak »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #8
georgeecollins wrote: post #3

The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…

We've never met, but I believe you owe me about $17,000 in quarters, with interest. :) Now if I can only hunt down those bastards who made Tempest, Qix, and Galaga...

Qix... I need to play that again now...

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#20

Post by andybak »

klodolph wrote: post #13
icefox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the question would be what type of game could be made with that type of team today?

There are still great people working in the games industry, but it's larger and segmented. These days you can be an engine programmer working on e.g. Frostbite or id Tech for EA and ZeniMax, respectively. These have resulted in games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Doom (2016). Dragon Age: Inquisition required a lot of engine work because Frostbite was originally designed for first-person shooters like Battlefield,…

This article is mind expanding if you want to understand what happens on just the graphics side of things in a modern game: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-gra...

Bear in mind everything that's not included in this analysis: AI, mesh deformation, level logic, player mechanics, enemy mechanics, all the lower level stuff and so many things I haven't even thought of.

Post reply on HN