Comment by jordand
15 hours ago
I work in the games industry with exceptionally skilled system programmers that can do that too. They're getting on in age, and there's fewer programmers in the younger generations that are interested in any of it. Technology is sadly increasingly homogenising around Unreal Engine 5
Around the time Mantle/Vulkan-type APIs entered the scene, I ended up hearing a lot of "yes, these APIs much more complicated to use, but fewer people need to touch D3D/your graphics API anymore with these freely available engines." Was my impression correct?
> Technology is sadly increasingly homogenising around Unreal Engine 5
I kinda get the commodification of games engines and Unreal. I am sure a lot of us saw the gaming revolution unfold, watching gaming companies one-up each other in graphics and interactivity. But once you get to the point of UE5, Unity, or Godot there is little need or value to make a game engine from scratch anymore.
Don't get me wrong, if you want to write an engine, go for it. But if you just want to make a game then an existing engine is good enough.
If everyone stops writing game engines then who is going to program unreal engine/unity/godot?
I’ll admit I lost the plot a long time ago, but there’s a part of me that wonders if the main purpose behind the game engine and graphics card treadmill is to line the pockets of people who sell games engines and graphics cards. My subjective sense of the connection between technology and enjoyment as a player started to degrade about a decade back.
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The people working for Unreal/Unity/Godot. Nobody writes search engines any more - except for Google et al. Nobody writes advertising systems - except for all the advertising businesses.
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Not unique to gamedev; during the boom at the turn of the millennium the bar to entry to programming was dropped on the floor to fill demand.
The vast majority of programmers today don't even understand the basics of how-computer-work - not just microarchitecural considerations but even how to interface with the kernel efficiently / understand the performance considerations of their target platform.
Ask your average programmer how to say, simply perform I/O efficiently as possible on NT given some workload characteristics. One needs to first understand this before they can begin making concessions in favour of other demands (abstraction, flexibility, ect) and very few programmers can even get beyond the starting line.