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Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

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Re: Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

#21

Post by craftkiller »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #9

GitHub is filled with these because it’s always easier to make an engine than a game. You play with the fun tech and make the graphics engine. You never make any tough tradeoffs because you don’t have a target to aim at. When an engine becomes useful is when it has to make a game. All your abstractions tend to get rearranged and hard decisions are made.

> it’s always easier to make an engine than a game.

It could just be different interests. The kind of person who makes a game engine is a technical optimization-focused tech-focused person, sort of like a mechanic. In order to make a game, you have to deal with softer concepts like "is this fun" which is more like a designer/artist. Game studios need to bring these people together, but in the FOSS world the mechanics are happy to spend their time building an engine that runs beautifully without concerning themselves with the art side of things.

Re: Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

#24

Post by CooCooCaCha »

craftkiller wrote: post #21
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #9

GitHub is filled with these because it’s always easier to make an engine than a game. You play with the fun tech and make the graphics engine. You never make any tough tradeoffs because you don’t have a target to aim at. When an engine becomes useful is when it has to make a game. All your abstractions tend to get rearranged and hard decisions are made.

> it’s always easier to make an engine than a game. It could just be different interests. The kind of person who makes a game engine is a technical optimization-focused tech-focused person, sort of like a mechanic. In order to make a game, you have to deal with softer concepts like "is this fun" which is more like a designer/artist. Game studios need to bring these people together, but in the FOSS world the mechanics…

Yes and no. It’s true that some people really only care about a slice of the process, but if you’ve been around the gamedev scene long enough you’ll also see people working on very technically ambitious projects while they’re fooling themselves thinking they’re making a game.

I just need a few more years working on my 4D non-euclidian voxel MMO engine before I can make my game!

Re: Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

#25

Post by tracker1 »

tapoxi wrote: post #17
bobajeff wrote: post #8

About garbage collection: Are there a lot of Unity/Godot devs unaware that their engines are using GC? I would assume they'd have accepted the cost of GC already. Unreal devs I can understand having an issue with it though.

GDScript in Godot doesn't use GC, it uses reference counting and doesn't "stop the world". Other languages that bind into the engine do this too, (C++, SwiftGodot, Rust-Godot) C# obviously does, Miguel de Icaza actually started SwiftGodot because he (ironically) ended up hating GC pauses after promoting C# for so long

Go does surprisingly well at keeping GC freezes to a minimal in a way that you're unlikely to notice... C# has gotten a lot better since the core split as well. That said, there's a lot that comes down to how a developer creates a game.

I was added late to a project working on a training simulation engine, similar to games, where each avatar in the game was a separate thread... man, the GC pauses on the server would sometimes freeze for literally 10-15s, and it was not good at all. I refactored it to use an event-loop model and only 2 other threads, which ran much better overall. Even though it wasn't strictly a game itself, the techniques still matter. Funny how running through a list of a few hundred things is significantly better than a few hundred threads each with their own timers, etc.

Re: Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

#26

Post by tracker1 »

furyofantares wrote: post #20
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reference counting is a GC algorithm from CS point of view, as looking into any worthwhile reference will show.

It's not what people mean when they say GC though, especially in reference to games, where you care about your peak frame time more than about your average frame time.

You should watch some of the more recent Gamers Nexus videos... the average frame pacing counts for a lot, and they're making a concerted effort to show this, as it does represent the level of "jank" in games very well.

Re: Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

#28

Post by corysama »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #9

GitHub is filled with these because it’s always easier to make an engine than a game. You play with the fun tech and make the graphics engine. You never make any tough tradeoffs because you don’t have a target to aim at. When an engine becomes useful is when it has to make a game. All your abstractions tend to get rearranged and hard decisions are made.

Having spent a couple decades making engines that did ship games, now I spend a fair bit of free time helping noobs make engines even though statistically nearly none of them end up shipping games.

Making a game engine is a fun and highly-engaging means to learning high-performance programming. Yes, it would be better if you also were able to invest enough to ship a game. But, don't let the infeasibility of that goal stop you from learning and having fun.

Re: Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

#30

Post by nsxwolf »

kgwxd wrote: post #7
nsxwolf wrote: post #2

Vibe coded?

Is there something that gives it that impression? Didn't look at it too hard, but the readme tells a story of focused passion for the language, and programming in general. Vibe documented?

Readme full of emojis.
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