31–40 of 73 posts
This is a massive undertaking... building a whole language + IDE + engine from scratch is insane. I am curious: what made you go with a custom language instead of just embedding Lua or something? Was it a learning thing, or do you think Exp brings something Lua (or GML) doesn't?
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Definitely not. Replying to the trope that exists in gamedev that "making the game is the only valuable thing, people who make engines are just making excuses". > Firing up godot/unity/unreal eliminates an entire universe of reasons for why you haven't shipped more content today Not everyone wants to "ship content". > brutal exposure when you don't have a creative vision to follow Also assumes everyone must have or f…
> EDIT: And yeah, I'm tired of people collectively shitting on other people's project in HN without even looking at it, or without considering why not having monocultures is good. The person you replied to simply wrote the following, which seems like the opposite of shitting on the project this post is about: "The benefit of engaging with a project like this is that you gain a very plausible set of excuses that can b…
In reality however, many people whom I know who built a game engine did it for a plethora of different additional reasons:
- Learning C++, OpenGL, and other tech
- Similarly, learning a new language
- Learning how a game engine works, by building one, and perhaps a better one afterwards, or for developing skills to work on existing engines
- Just because it is fun and you get a high from it
- Building an environment tailored to how they would like to build a game, e.g. because existing engines don't cut it in that regard. Basically building your own tool(s).
- Building tools for others, so that they can build cool things, because you get satisfaction from that.
- Building a new engine because existing large engines have gone stale for some reason (an attempt at becoming the next big engine that structurally solves the tech debt problems that the status quo ones developed over time)
- Similarly, building an engine that has a new paradigm as first-class citizen, e.g. ECS
- A combination of any of these.
I had a similar mindset in the past, not understanding why anyone would like to build their own engine and not a game, because it happened very often and I was the one who liked to build games. Now I do see that there's more to it than just the product it is supposed to create. I learned that when I got into tool development, and noticing that I got a lot of satisfaction from building tools that other people can use well.
The inspiration on GameMaker is clear and very much appreciated. Can the IDE run on other OSes besides Windows? You seem to be using WinForms.I tried building it and running through Wine, but it didn't work. Congrats on the project, making an IDE is no easy task. I believe there's room for a game engine to offer what GameMaker 8.1 used to (near instant runs, extremely fast iteration time for 2D games).
Apart from "I have fun working on this", which is always legit, what's the point and who's supposed to use it? What'd be the benefit using with or working on it over e.g. Godot, which is, imo, pretty much the open source way to go if you want more than an IDE and libs/code you'd use to make a game. It's also written in C# and offers GDScript as a more lightweight programming language with C# being ready to be used fo…
> It's also written in C# No, Godot is written in C++. You can use C# to code games, as well as GDScript or other languages.
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The benefit of engaging with a project like this is that you gain a very plausible set of excuses that can be leveraged when you find out that making the game is the actual hard part. Firing up godot/unity/unreal eliminates an entire universe of reasons for why you haven't shipped more content today. Tools that "just work" can feel like brutal exposure when you don't have a creative vision to follow.
> when you find out that making the game is the actual hard part. Guilty as charged ^-^" Spent over 3 years trying to make an engine built in Swift cause I loved Swift, before I had to admit that an engine without an editor is almost useless in actual game development, and even 10 years won't bring me close to the level of Godot's editor (though Miguel de Icaza the Mono/Xamarin/Gnome guy did port the Godot Editor to…
The inspiration on GameMaker is clear and very much appreciated. Can the IDE run on other OSes besides Windows? You seem to be using WinForms.I tried building it and running through Wine, but it didn't work. Congrats on the project, making an IDE is no easy task. I believe there's room for a game engine to offer what GameMaker 8.1 used to (near instant runs, extremely fast iteration time for 2D games).
Thanks. As you said, the IDE is built on winforms, so it's windows only. maybe it was a mistake to not to use a cross platform framework like avalonia, but i really like the winforms designer, and winforms is the only UI framework i ever used, except for MAUI which is not a good idea to build an IDE on.
The inspiration on GameMaker is clear and very much appreciated. Can the IDE run on other OSes besides Windows? You seem to be using WinForms.I tried building it and running through Wine, but it didn't work. Congrats on the project, making an IDE is no easy task. I believe there's room for a game engine to offer what GameMaker 8.1 used to (near instant runs, extremely fast iteration time for 2D games).
Thanks. As you said, the IDE is built on winforms, so it's windows only. maybe it was a mistake to not to use a cross platform framework like avalonia, but i really like the winforms designer, and winforms is the only UI framework i ever used, except for MAUI which is not a good idea to build an IDE on.
Every other UI framework I worked before and after always left me with the impression that something was lacking, in speed of development, fast iteration, but also in the quality of the abstractions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. As you said, the IDE is built on winforms, so it's windows only. maybe it was a mistake to not to use a cross platform framework like avalonia, but i really like the winforms designer, and winforms is the only UI framework i ever used, except for MAUI which is not a good idea to build an IDE on.
Windows.Forms is becoming less of a problem with projects like LibreWinForms [0] progressing quickly. I just tried to build your project and there are only a few classes that are not implemented when it comes to the GUI. [0] https://github.com/wieslawsoltes/LibreWinForms
Wow, my post suddenly went viral! Just opened GitHub a few minutes ago, and saw +17 stars on my project from the last few hours... Anyway, i see a lot of people asking WHY making ky own engine or language. So the main answer is: for fun. it's clearly not going to be even close to a professional engine like godot/unity/modern gamemaker, but this is mine, and the others aren't :) But i wrote more about it here: https:/…
- do you feel that this could be used to make a (simple) drawing program?
- have you considered setting up your codebase as a Literate Program?
http://literateprogramming.com/
Notably, that would then allow publishing the project as a PDF for didactive purposes.