Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter • Hacker News Board

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#81

Post by jeremiep » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

ythn wrote: post #17

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.

Every single person I've ever heard talk about Unity or Unreal in such an aggressive way was completely clueless about software development. They all have high hopes of making the best game/engine the world has ever seen yet are stuck in the planning phase. Either that or they're gullible gamers who watched too many youtubers.

The reality is, every single engineer who built the very optimized engines you my have in mind (that power a few specific games at most) have great respect for Unity and Unreal.

Game development is a small world, people know each other across companies, share tech stuff on Twitter and go to the same conferences.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#82

Post by jeremiep » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #49

AndyNemmity wrote: post #41

"Usually an outstanding problem or issue is already known by your staff, and often they have tried to make you aware of this problem, but usually it gets prioritized into nothingness, or filtered into white noise by your chain of command where no action gets done." This is the same as being a consultant. You come on site, you listen to everyone and make notes of it, and then you make a presentation and plan for direc…

As a consultant, they never change.

As an employee happy with his current employer, those who can change will and won't hire consultants in the process.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#83

Post by zanny » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

laythea wrote: post #74

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'…

Yes. I'm not sure that is a good thing for the consumer though, and has led to the market being flooded by rubbish. It is one thing to produce a game. Another, to produce a good game.

Both ends of the market have been driven wildly off course. The major publishers have become so risk averse that the only games they greenlight are iterative skinner box perpetual loot box cash grab wastes of talent.

And on the low end you have the Unity asset store run amok.

I'm not sure how you do it, but there is a happy middle of reasonable risk with reasonable competency missing in the market. There are few games made there every year, but they are a paltry few next to the regurgitated annual CoD game or the thousand random shovelwares put on Steam every month.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#84

Post by krapp » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #59

krapp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam. It's because there are so many crappy games on Steam that it makes it all but impossible for indie developers with decent games to be discovered. The perception that Steam is a cesspool of con-artists and incompetents depresses the perceived value of any game on the platform not released by a known publisher, meaning any independent game is…

Similarly, it is not because one can play a guitar that they are entitled to turn into musician, or writing something doesn't turn one into a writer. There is crap in all kinds of artistic work, for some reason devs seem to think they should be special and get everything for free.

> Similarly, it is not because one can play a guitar that they are entitled to turn into musician, or writing something doesn't turn one into a writer.

I disagree.. playing a guitar does make one a musician, and writing does make one a writer. What either is not entitled to is success in the marketplace, but then, no one is, regardless of skill. Once you put your work into the marketplace, the market decides its value, and your value by proxy. But for that to work successfully, the marketplace has to efficiently sort for quality, and one way to enforce quality is having the barriers to entry be sufficiently high. In practice, that doesn't often work because entrants don't want to be sorted efficiently, they want to be sorted to the top to maximize exposure and revenue. It's why SEO exists - to optimize the Googlebot for you and you alone by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Steam also wants to maximize the size of its library and revenue, so it has an incentive to engineer a marketplace that favors quantity over quality.

But even amateurs put in more effort than the developers publishing much of the garbage onto Steam - using the term "developers" loosely. These are incoherent rage games or weekend projects, barely functional tech demos and tutorial games, asset flips, etc. Games that don't even run. If the bar for quality on Steam was merely "amateur" then I would be happy, but it isn't. There seems to be no bar, and that makes it bad for everyone, except maybe Valve.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#85

Post by mdorazio » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

martin_ky wrote: post #69

I'm sure this article resonated with many engineers, not just from the game industry. What resonated with me the most, was the part about hiring a consultant, only to tell management what their employees have been telling them all along (for a ridiculous hourly rate of course). The simplified executive line of reasoning, why to rather trust an external entity over their own people, goes usually along these lines: "We…

In addition to what direfungasaur said about helping cut through political issues in a company, bringing in outside analysis can help for a couple of additional reasons. One is that individuals employees can be wrong. A change that engineers have been asking for might seem ok, but in actuality would destroy margins or otherwise be detrimental to the company as a whole if you look at broader information that might not be available to the engineers. Another reason is that if a company gets to the point where it's even considering bringing in outside help, it likely has a large number of issues that need to be prioritized. The one that a few employees have been making noise about might already be well-acknowledged, but is way down the list of Big Problems.

That's the "good case" anyway. In actuality, management consultants (the kind you're referring to) are usually brought in so someone can cover their ass and say "look, the smart, expensive people said we should do X!" regardless of whether or not X was a difficult solution to figure out.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#86

Post by Kapura » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

As somebody who writes code for games for a living, I found this article fascinating. Something that was coming up in my mind again and again as I was reading through it is the question of who has the power to affect the necessary changes. That seems to be the crux of a lot of the issues; is the studio leadership wrongminded, or have they put the wrong people at the gate?

The parable of the producer ignoring engineering specialities when assigning tickets seemed especially gregarious. Why was that person unable to learn, even after the engineers raised the issue? Why were they still there? Were they friendly with the higher-ups, or what? Why was there no will to improve the process until external help had to be brought on?

It also reminds me of stories I had heard from inside Microsoft in the pre-Nadella era. Tales of power brokers and entrenched lifers who could make things easy or impossible on a whim. What is the nature of the organisations that allow people like these to take root?

It's funny how small scale engineering problems are rooted in code and large scale engineering problems are rooted in people.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#87

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

danschuller wrote: post #68

pjmlp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#88

Post by pandaman » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #87

danschuller wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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".

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#89

Post by hectormalot » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #85

martin_ky wrote: post #69

I'm sure this article resonated with many engineers, not just from the game industry. What resonated with me the most, was the part about hiring a consultant, only to tell management what their employees have been telling them all along (for a ridiculous hourly rate of course). The simplified executive line of reasoning, why to rather trust an external entity over their own people, goes usually along these lines: "We…

In addition to what direfungasaur said about helping cut through political issues in a company, bringing in outside analysis can help for a couple of additional reasons. One is that individuals employees can be wrong. A change that engineers have been asking for might seem ok, but in actuality would destroy margins or otherwise be detrimental to the company as a whole if you look at broader information that might not…

As a management consultant myself, another thing that clients tell me is that the ability to bring the message across in a way management understands and can act upon is typically valued.

I’ve of course heard the “you’re saying the same as what the engineers have been saying for years” at various points, and management might not always listen well enough to engineers, but I think people underestimate the importance of synthesizing their messages to get management to act

Re: Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter

#90

Post by Mononokay » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

always_good wrote: post #70

Mononokay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's Blizzard done that's technically impressive as of late? They scrapped Titan, and Overwatch isn't particularly groundbreaking from what I can tell.

This is a sad comment that reeks of the gaming community where nobody creates anything so they've no grasp on the feats that these companies have been delivering over and over again for decades.

It's a genuine question; their most recent games have been an FPS, a MOBA, and a card game. I can't tell what "cutting edge game tech" that they happen to be creating with them.

Good games? Depending on your outlook, yeah. But there's nothing really...different? About them?

Their anticheat, maybe? It's a bit impressive.