Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by dagw » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

boredtofears wrote: post #61

Townley wrote: 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…

Making a game is at least an order of magnitude harder than making a website. Web apps are constrained by the protocols upon which their built (mostly the lifecycle of HTTP requests). Games are gigantic state machines that also require complicated rendering cycles. Unity and godot et el ARE good developer experiences in that they remove much of the complicated stuff even if the abstractions they use require them to b…

Making a game is at least an order of magnitude harder than making a website.

Ridiculous statement. Making a polished AAA game is orders of magnitudes harder than making a React ToDo Clone. Making a Tetris or Snake clone is orders of magnitude easier than making Gmail. With engines like Unity you go from never having written a game to a shitty 3D fps game in a weekend.

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

#192

Post by stuu99 » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

arduinomancer wrote: post #15

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

No post body was provided.

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

#193

Post by mamcx » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

The other niche where this kind of thing happens: ERP/eCommerce applications.

And at least from my POV, is where it ACTUALLY need it, not just is fun.

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

#194

Post by meheleventyone » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #190

meheleventyone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’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 a…

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.

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

#195

Post by runevault » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

verdagon wrote: post #2

Always a pleasant surprise to be scrolling through HN and seeing one of my articles on the front page! For anyone interested in how that code would get zero memory safety overhead without the classic borrow checker, a big part of it is because of the "region borrow checker" [0]. There are some other factors (iso regions, hybrid-generational-memory, etc.) but region borrow checking is the big one. [0] https://verdagon…

To someone else's point the article says it was not implemented yet at the time. Assuming it is I'd love to see a follow up after you built what you discuss in this post.

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

#196

Post by mattgreenrocks » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

Centigonal wrote: post #46

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…

Working on languages and runtimes is just fun on its own. It ends up pulling in many facets of CS: graphs, perf, grammars, automata, resource allocation, etc.

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

#197

Post by ModernMech » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

Centigonal wrote: post #46

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…

It's not game development that brings out the yak shaving, it's programming language development. Game development is just a gateway drug because it provides so many opportunities for good abstractions to make things easier. The mistake everyone makes is thinking that they can create a programming language while also doing X, where X is whatever they had doing when they got the itch to do a PL. Really, if you want to do a PL right, you have to do it full time.

Actually I'm not sure it's really a mistake, it's just that doing PL development is so much fun that there's no reason to go back to the original project, if original the impetus for it was to have fun.

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

#198

Post by candiddevmike » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #111

I decided to use Godot to make a lowpoly online FPS, I don't think it's a great choice, but I've read good things about godot networking... I first wanted to make it in C++ and opengl, and it did not look like a difficult thing to do, but godot is good enough for a lot of things, it's small, and it allows me to do multiplatform, which is such a big bonus, since C++ is never easy to use on several platforms. I have no…

Are you using GDScript? How are you liking it?

To me, the biggest hurdle with game development is always assets. I'm a terrible artist/musician.

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

#199

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

Kuinox wrote: post #178

pjmlp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#200

Post by jokoon » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #198

jokoon wrote: post #111

I decided to use Godot to make a lowpoly online FPS, I don't think it's a great choice, but I've read good things about godot networking... I first wanted to make it in C++ and opengl, and it did not look like a difficult thing to do, but godot is good enough for a lot of things, it's small, and it allows me to do multiplatform, which is such a big bonus, since C++ is never easy to use on several platforms. I have no…

Are you using GDScript? How are you liking it? To me, the biggest hurdle with game development is always assets. I'm a terrible artist/musician.

Well it's not as comfortable as python, but it's good.

I plan to make assets using procedural generation of terrain, building indoors and streets.