Live data from Hacker News

Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

verdagon.dev

91–100 of 232 posts

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#91
post #89

What are some of the interesting tradeoffs this language has made? Ideally with super small code samples

The author details some of them in the "Featuring" section in the front page [0]. There is also a comparison with different languages [1].

It seems the language is still in very early stages. Not production ready.

[0] https://vale.dev/

[1] https://vale.dev/comparisons

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#92
post #19

It's interesting that this phenomenon is much more prevalent in game development, as opposed to (for example) web development: some people build their own web development frameworks, but it seems like every game dev tries to make an engine at some point. My theory why: good web frameworks consider developer experience to be of paramount importance, and invest heavily into examples, documentation, and API improvements…

Probably, many programmers played videogames when they were little, so there's always an underlying dream of creating one.

I dabbled in games development, but I've met the same problem; videogames development is actually much more than programming (the engine), and the creative part, which is the primary one, may not appeal people who are technically-minded.

This phenomenon is very visible in Rust; there are several game engines, but very few production quality games. The most famous game engine, Bevy, is very popular, but after approximately two years of development is still an alpha (and a very changing one); contrast this with Fyrox, which is much more stable, but is considerably less popular (essentially, unused).

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#93

I don’t get why are programmers so obsessed with the tools they use for the job? More than any profession

I can't believe all the catty defensive replies. The answer is that programming is designing automation (automatic computation) and functionality of computers. So getting into that mindset naturally leads to "well, what If I can automate what I'm doing too? What if I can make a function that makes these functions?". Not to mention, a gardener isn't tempted to trim his rake into a better rake, because that wouldn't work - the tools are made by a different process than what they are used for. Not so in programming

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#94

I don't know what it is about game development that really brings out the yak shaving in people. One time, about 8 years ago, I backed a game called Nowhere[1] by a very talented programmer. The original premise was an alien life simulator. Well, it's been eight years, and development is still going strong! The developer is currently working on the String implementation for the programming language he invented[2], wh…

Thank you for backing his work, his posts and twitter feed are a gold mine for some pretty unique ideas in signed distance field and other rendering research.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#95

I don't know what it is about game development that really brings out the yak shaving in people. One time, about 8 years ago, I backed a game called Nowhere[1] by a very talented programmer. The original premise was an alien life simulator. Well, it's been eight years, and development is still going strong! The developer is currently working on the String implementation for the programming language he invented[2], wh…

I read an amazing quote online about any satelite company trying to create their own custom rocket to launch its satellite instead of using existing infrastructure.

The day they decide to get into that is the day they stop being a satelite company and become a rocket company instead. The person put in much more eloquent words so wish i could find that comment but its sounds similar to that.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#96
post #64
post #58

> These languages are mostly fine... but C# is slow,.... First of all, it is a matter of which implementation we are talking about. Second, all major implementations wouldn't have had any issue dealing with the demos shown on the blog. I guess it was a good learning process about compilers for the author.

C# is very fast on average, but due to its runtime/GC it won't give you the consistent performance you need for game engine internals, which is what they meant by "slow".

My last 8 yrs of game development have been in a good part about how to make c# go fast, and it is definitely possible, but you will have to write in a style that is different from the norm.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#97

I don't know what it is about game development that really brings out the yak shaving in people. One time, about 8 years ago, I backed a game called Nowhere[1] by a very talented programmer. The original premise was an alien life simulator. Well, it's been eight years, and development is still going strong! The developer is currently working on the String implementation for the programming language he invented[2], wh…

This is a lot like what a YouTuber by the name of Randy has been doing: he decided to create his own game engine instead of using something like Godot/Unity/Unreal and it's been quite the adventure. His main YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RandallThomas/videos His secondary YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RandytheSequel/videos Of course, he still has nothing close to an actual game and the progr…

> as well as something that actually has gained him a nice following of people who support him towards more videos.

A following which has recently turned against him after they funded 6k a month on his patreon, and he flatout told them that he would stop communicating, doing YouTube videos and he would also stop working on the game they were giving funding for.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#98

I don't know what it is about game development that really brings out the yak shaving in people. One time, about 8 years ago, I backed a game called Nowhere[1] by a very talented programmer. The original premise was an alien life simulator. Well, it's been eight years, and development is still going strong! The developer is currently working on the String implementation for the programming language he invented[2], wh…

Wait, that's the game by Leonard Ritter, aka paniq! I loved his (demoscene) demo Masagin[1] way back when, and have the SVGs of the geometric shapes somewhere, with a vague idea of bleaching them onto t-shirts (speaking of old projects that never come to fruition...) Frankly, I can't say I'm surprised that's where he's at with Nowhere. Well, I'm glad he's having fun. [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50131

At least the game's name also records where its progress is going.

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#99
post #19

It's interesting that this phenomenon is much more prevalent in game development, as opposed to (for example) web development: some people build their own web development frameworks, but it seems like every game dev tries to make an engine at some point. My theory why: good web frameworks consider developer experience to be of paramount importance, and invest heavily into examples, documentation, and API improvements…

Both industry leaders and indie programmers have used Unity and Unreal to make finished games. Large studios may opt to create their own engines at one point or another, but even with all their resources, these custom engines don't always work out.

An example of this would be the frostbite engine, of which multiple devs at EA reported that it was an absolute nightmare to work with. Turns out, if you need developers to work on the engine at the same time the game is developed, you just lose manpower to actually engineer your game. [1]

[1]: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ea-frostbite-engine-history...

Re: Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optimi…

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.
Post reply on HN