201–210 of 251 posts
Graphics programming in games is like playing the guitar. It's cool, but everybody wants to do it. Make the bold choice. Be a game network programmer. Nobody wants to do it, it's really hard and it kinda sucks. Play the accordion :)
Any resources? It actually sounds more interesting to me since hearing about Rollback Netcode. Any front-end thing always gives me headache anyway.
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> This is why most indy games now are 2D. That's do-able. Often in HTML/JavaScript. Most indie games are definitely not in HTML/JavaScript unless you count vibe coded ones.
I can't speak to "most", but the incredible CrossCode displays the HTML5 shield on startup, so indie games on the web stack do exist and can be amazing.
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> I can spot a unity or unreal game from miles away. They have a smell if you will that is very hard to escape. Confirmation bias. Are you saying Hollow Knight, Cities: Skylines and Escape from Tarkov have the same kind of "smell"? It's as ridiculous as saying that you can spot a SaaS written in Rust from miles away.
For 2D games I can usually tell if it is made in Unity, and I don’t even develop with Unity. Hollow Knight for instance does not get me immersed like I do for Celeste or Bolatro. When I look at Hallow Knight I see moving animated sprites instead of characters, and it’s like that for the majority of 2D Unity games for me.
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Agree with almost all of that. Unless you are targeting some obscure or old platform, I don't even know how you'd justify trying to write a 3D engine from scratch in 2026, except as a fun learning experience. Also, think about tooling. Last time I wrote an engine from scratch, the tooling to support it probably took way more time than the engine did.
AI changes this a lot. You can realistically get a featured 3d engine+editor up and running in a couple week with AI, working solo. Probably better than what Godot or even Unity gives you. Also AI is very good at editor/tooling stuff, I've even found it getting better at graphics programming stuff, just telling it to 1-shot implementing gpu occlusion culling, ddgi probes, taa, etc. type of features. Also for stuff li…
Do you want to make games, or do 3D engine programming? If you want to make games, use an existing engine. Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, and Bevy are good choices. You'll learn the higher level issues of graphics, not how to push pixels around. The real problem is making it fun. If you want to do 3D engine programming, be aware that there are too many bad game engines. In Rust land, where I am, there are three failed…
I'd very much argue against somebody making game development their career, at least from job security grounds. But graphics programming is different.
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The amount of otherwise decent games that run poorly due to Unity or UE is very unfortunate. I wish people would stop recommending this stuff. I do hope Godot and Bevy are better, but I'm not sure if they are. To name some games with very bad perf issues that I've played in the last couple years: Core Keeper (Unity), WORMHOLE (Unity, mostly see the lag in endless mode), Crab Champions (UE4, have to use nonsense upsca…
> The amount of otherwise decent games that run poorly due to Unity or UE is very unfortunate. I wish people would stop recommending this stuff. I do hope Godot and Bevy are better, but I'm not sure if they are. Games don't run poorly "because of unity or UE", those engines are highly optimized for the graphical fidelity they provide, It's super easy to find examples of games that run flawlessly with these engines (U…
Do you want to make games, or do 3D engine programming? If you want to make games, use an existing engine. Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, and Bevy are good choices. You'll learn the higher level issues of graphics, not how to push pixels around. The real problem is making it fun. If you want to do 3D engine programming, be aware that there are too many bad game engines. In Rust land, where I am, there are three failed…
If it's all for a hobby, creating your own engine is a lot of fun by itself.
Should also include be under 25 and have lots of time to dedicate to it. I've always been interested in the idea of graphics programming and a few years ago I started teaching myself vulkan. Not sure quite how long I spent in total, 6 months of free evenings, maybe a bit less. I'm close to having a rendering framework. But it's one of those things where the further you get with it the more you realise how little you…
Sadly, Vulkan is really painful way of learning graphics programming. Doing almost anything requires large amounts of boilerplate. Almost everything you need to do, for example to make shadows, requires just 10x more code than the technique fundamentally requires. For learning graphics programming, in my opinion, writing software renderers is much more enjoyable path. Code is less, the code you write touches fundamen…
By the way, this is what renders like OTOY Octane do.