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The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

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Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#41

Post by krapp »

alexvitkov wrote: post #38
krapp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the argument for using a custom engine if you have specific design goals that can't be met by existing engines, but that seems seems like an edge case. I think 99% of game concepts can probably be done in Unity, Godot, or Unreal. Meanwhile you could probably surpass Handmade Hero with any off the shelf engine with a tutorial and a few hours' work, or even a project template from an asset store. The biggest…

> 99% of game concepts can probably be done in Unity, Godot, or Unreal. The vast majority of developers use these engines, so you would expect the vast majority of games to be stuff that's easy to make within those engines. With how samey new games are, it's hard to argue that what we see comes close to the full design space of possible interesting games. That's partially developers copying games they've seen work an…

I think it's hard to argue that there exists a vast space of untapped design potential for games that can't be realized only because of the limitations of off the shelf game engines. Most people who use custom engines use them for mainstream common game concepts, because they disagree with architectural decisions about the engine itself (most likely the language being used) and they would rather start from scratch than work with the engine.

Handmade Hero can be made in Unity or Godot. So could Braid. I'm actually struggling to think of a game built in a custom engine that's so radically out of pocket design-wise that it needs a custom engine. I'm not arguing that the use case doesn't exist, I'm arguing that most of the time using a custom engine is a matter of convenience and comfort rather than creative expression, and isn't strictly necessary.

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#42

Post by wasmperson »

krapp wrote: post #41
alexvitkov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of game concepts can probably be done in Unity, Godot, or Unreal. The vast majority of developers use these engines, so you would expect the vast majority of games to be stuff that's easy to make within those engines. With how samey new games are, it's hard to argue that what we see comes close to the full design space of possible interesting games. That's partially developers copying games they've seen work an…

I think it's hard to argue that there exists a vast space of untapped design potential for games that can't be realized only because of the limitations of off the shelf game engines. Most people who use custom engines use them for mainstream common game concepts, because they disagree with architectural decisions about the engine itself (most likely the language being used) and they would rather start from scratch th…

A custom engine is never _needed_ technically speaking since COTS engines are often customizable to the point where you can do anything you want with them. That doesn't mean that they don't influence the design of games, though.

There's a talk that Casey gives where he explains how he implemented the movement system for The Witness, in which he shows examples of Unity-based "walking simulator"-type games dealing with limitations of the engine in ways that The Witness was able to totally avoid. This allowed the game's artists to be creative with set design without worrying as much about performance issues or collision bugs, thus potentially opening up more design space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE8MVNMzpbo

Here's some praise of The Witness by Fabien Giesen:

> That’s where I am right now. I have never seen another game as cohesive as this. Not even close. Without getting into specifics or spoiler territory, I have never seen a game with such manifest intention behind every single detail, nor one where all the details cohere this well into a whole. This goes for the design and gameplay itself, but also across traditional hard boundaries. Game design and art play off each other, and both of these are tightly coupled with some of the engine tech in the game. It’s amazing. There is no single detail in the game that would be hard to accomplish by itself, but the whole is much more than the sum of its parts, with no signs of the endless compromise that are normally a reality in every project.

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/thoughts-on-the-wit...

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#43

Post by harrison_clarke »

_zagj wrote: post #31

For those unaware, Casey Muratori started a project called Handmade Hero in 2014 to build a complete game from scratch while livestreaming the entire process, with the goal of showing people not just how, but why, rolling your own engine (hence the "handmade" part) is better than relying on Unity, Unreal, or some other leaky abstraction. He even solicited pre-orders for the finished product, IIRC. Ten years later, he…

i think it's kinda funny, because Unity is very clearly inspired by some of casey's work

the big one is immediate mode UIs, which casey popularized back in 2005. Unity's editor uses it to this day, and if you do editor scripting, you'll be using it. for in-game UI, they switched to a component-based one, which also somewhat aligns with casey's opinions. and they shipped DOTS, which aligns even more with what he's saying

i think his lack of shipping is mostly because he switched to teaching and has absolutely no pressure to ship, rather than his approach being bad

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#44

Post by igouy »

bevyenjoyer wrote: post #36
igouy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "OOP is made for large teams" "you're not using it as intended" "its not made to model your domain hierarchy" Are there actual references for those quotes? Were they said by some kind-of expert or by a sales person or by cousin John? Are they strawmen set-up to knock-down.

I highlighted "OOP is made for large teams", right clicked, clicked "Search Google for ..." and found the answer almost immediately. Give it a shot!

1) 'AI Overview "No, it's not strictly true that Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is exclusively made for large teams, but it does offer significant advantages in such environments."'

2) 'Casey Muratori -- The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five'

Still no reliable reference.

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#45

Post by db48x »

igouy wrote: post #26
vouwfietsman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether it was made for that is immaterial This is in the talk, he explicitly says that its often brought up that "OOP is made for large teams" "you're not using it as intended" "its not made to model your domain hierarchy" etc etc. The first 30 minutes is his reaction to that, disproving it. Whether thats true or interesting is a different question, but its explicitly stated in the video, at the start, before he g…

> "OOP is made for large teams" "you're not using it as intended" "its not made to model your domain hierarchy" Are there actual references for those quotes? Were they said by some kind-of expert or by a sales person or by cousin John? Are they strawmen set-up to knock-down.

Seriously? Just open any trade rag from the last 40 or 50 years.

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#46

Post by Fellshard »

chapliboy wrote: post #17

I thought it was very interesting about how Alan Kay and Bjarne Stroustrup may have been applying wisdom from their old fields of expertise and how that affected their philosophy. There is an appeal to building complexity through Emergence, where you design several small self-contained pieces that have rich interactions with each other and through those rich interactions you can accomplish more complex things. Its ho…

The universe may work this way, but we're not God, and modes of computation that work like this still inevitably be impossible for us to predict or comprehend. This may be interesting if you're trying to run simulations (remember the point about SIMULA?) but it's not something you could use to accomplish specific ends, I expect.

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#47

Post by db48x »

igouy wrote: post #44
bevyenjoyer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highlighted "OOP is made for large teams", right clicked, clicked "Search Google for ..." and found the answer almost immediately. Give it a shot!

1) 'AI Overview "No, it's not strictly true that Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is exclusively made for large teams, but it does offer significant advantages in such environments."' 2) 'Casey Muratori -- The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five' Still no reliable reference.

You’ll get better results if you just search for “OOP large teams” rather than the specific phrase used in the video. You’ll get results like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming#Po... that point to specific references such as https://www.paulgraham.com/noop.html which says:

    Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because
    it suits the way they write software. At big companies, software
    tends to be written by large (and frequently changing) teams of
    mediocre programmers. Object-oriented programming imposes a
    discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them from
    doing too much damage.

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#48

Post by [deleted] »

_zagj wrote: post #39
zaphos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you linked indicates the reason for him not finishing is specifically that he didn't like his game design, which seems orthogonal to coding practices. He appears to have shipped middleware projects for RAD, and other contract work where he was not in charge of game design.

RAD was what, 15, 20 years ago? What has he released, in terms of proprietary or open source products, since then? Not just games, I mean ANYTHING. Refterm, and... what else? It's not like he was busy with his MSFT or RAD dayjob during this period.

[deleted]

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#49

Post by igouy »

db48x wrote: post #45
igouy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "OOP is made for large teams" "you're not using it as intended" "its not made to model your domain hierarchy" Are there actual references for those quotes? Were they said by some kind-of expert or by a sales person or by cousin John? Are they strawmen set-up to knock-down.

Seriously? Just open any trade rag from the last 40 or 50 years.

So it was a sales pitch? And we would have blindly believed the sales pitch because …?

(I asked for actual references for those quotes so we don't waste time with moving goal posts.)

Re: The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]

#50

Post by Jtsummers »

db48x wrote: post #47
igouy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) 'AI Overview "No, it's not strictly true that Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is exclusively made for large teams, but it does offer significant advantages in such environments."' 2) 'Casey Muratori -- The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five' Still no reliable reference.

You’ll get better results if you just search for “OOP large teams” rather than the specific phrase used in the video. You’ll get results like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming#Po... that point to specific references such as https://www.paulgraham.com/noop.html which says: Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because it suits the way they write software. At big companies, so…

He spends the first half of his presentation debunking the meme that OO was created for working with teams, not that it happens to be good for working with teams. Your quoted bit is not evidence of someone making the first claim, only the second.
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