there's so many fucking things that piss me off, but one of the things that pisses me off the most is basically every tech-focused indie dev who sees a shiny new toy (raytracing, nanite in ue5, DOTS/ECS in unity) and then apparently immediately suffer a blow to the head and completely forget about how people have made games for fucking decades
like for some reason a lot of unity devs are currently CONVINCED you just can't make games with the aforementioned tools. every time somebody asks how to do something, down to how to implement systems that were used minecraft, they do that thing like they're a stereotypical car mechanic and go "welllll it looks like you're going to have to implement a robust entity component system based architecture, gonna be pretty hard to learn" as if minecraft hasn't been around for nearly 12 goddamn years at this point
and like somebody else asked how to check if a player was in shadow in a game, something you can do in a particularly naive implementation just by casting rays from the player to each light, y'know? but somebody was like "okay so you're gonna want to use command buffers to blit a shadow map to a custom render texture and sample from that to see what the light level is there" like what the fuck? like this isn't a new tech thing but it's one of those dramatically overengineered solutions that drives me nuts
and there's a much of people who are like "unity is GARBAGE if they don't implement nanite. I NEED nanite to make my game" as if every other engine out there has been using virtualized geometry for a billion years and it's not just something that became generally available in ue5 for a bit over a fucking year while they've got a bunch of WIP screenshots and they're making a fuckin' 3d puzzle platformer
I understand the allure of shiny new tech, but people need to fucking chill and think about how we actually have been making videogames for fucking ages
a really big part of the problem on a fundamental level is that gamedev tooling is exceptionally poorly supported and exceptionally secretive.
This industry has had literally decades to develop a robust set of gamedev tools but because we are
- completely insistent on reinventing the wheel absolutely every time
- impossibly secretive over the most basic features
- completely unwilling to fund, use, or support open source tools
we end up with situations where - I've been working in games for literally 12 years and nearly every game I've worked on has reimplmented some fundamental thing like dialogue systems from scratch.
Can you imagine how film would have ended up if everyone had been like no I can't tell you how to move the camera nicely it's a SECRET
But that's basically where we are, in this embarrassing situation where gamedev just hates itself so thoroughly as an industry that we have no institutional foundation and even the 'easy solutions' we point new devs at still require them to build them from more-or-less scratch
