DayZ creator says frameworks are the future of game dev
Rocketwerkz CEO Dean Hall and Floating Point Origin Interactive founder Felipe Falanghe sound downright giddy when they talk about the new C# framework named "Brutal." During a recent call with Game Developer, the brains behind DayZ and Kerbal Space Program couldn't stop making random asides to each other about what they've pulled off with the tool and how they've inspired each other's work.
Their joy was infectious because once you understand how Brutal functions, you realize every new feature is a bona fide accomplishment even for this pair of seasoned developers. "It's called Brutal for a reason," Hall said after Felipe compared working with it to the experience of sitting on a bar stool while all your friends using engines like Godot are sitting on a comfy couch.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/rocketwerkz-ceo-predicts-frameworks-not-engines-will-be-future-of-game-developmentOpen linkView original on lemmy.sdf.org
For someone like me, who was a bit lost on the meaning of framework, framework here is what you use to build an engine (I thought it's on top of the engine instead)
Also, the beginning of the article is a bit messy and the author jumps around thoughts, but it gets an interesting read, and they even talk about how to actually use AI for benefit instead of for multiplying bugs:
Maybe we will finally see no-vibe solutions, like we saw no-code solutions 🌚
When it comes to game development, engines usually have their own IDE and have many tools ready that make it so you don't have to code everything - in Godot, for instance, you can create AnimationPlayer and AnimationTree to handle animations.
Frameworks (MonoGame for C#, libGDX for Java, LOVE2D for Lua) can be understood as "pre-engines" or libraries for those coming off webdev, they offer lots of ready made functions to make your life easier (input handling, loading and handling most types of data, showing stuff on screen), but you'll still need to code pretty much everything else.
A number of reasons I can think of.
One: debloat and performance. Unreal and Unity are extremely bloated. As much as I enjoy Godot, the bare minimum executable that it produces is over 20MB. Less bloat means less code being shipped which typically translates into better performance.
Two: better control of what's going on. Sure, UE's source is open for you to peek in and see what's going on, but it has literal decades of baggage. Unity has its way of doing things and, other than plugins, you're stuck with it. The point that Dean Hall makes of these engines all working based on scenes^["If you take Unity or Unreal, you have this editor scene and push play, it becomes a game scene and everything in it is relative to 0-0-0 of that scene," said Hall. "That's how you draw things, and it's so ingrained that people have a hard time imagining something that's different." (...) The thinking wasn't "Unity can't do this, I need a tool that can do this." It was "our game needs floating origin to work this way, how do we do it?"] and not every game needing that is spot on.
Three: Visual scripting isn't new and it leaves you stuck with the tool. There are several engines that offer visual scripting, some decades old (Clickteam Fusion, GameMaker, RPG Maker, Construct), being widely used for simpler games, but never for stuff that "thinks outside the box", so to speak.
I wouldn't go that far. A lot of big budget games will still use ready-made engines like UE and Unity simply due to cost and time, others will do things on their own "hard" way. CDProjekt ditched their own custom engine that powered Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 to work with UE going forward.
Not going to be the "death" of big engines because he's putting waaaay too much faith in people bothering to even search "how to do X using Y framework".
In other words, it's a StackOverflow that won't berate you for "a stupid, repeated question" which should, in theory, help out with new stuff so long as it is properly documented, which seems to be the case with the Vulkan API