{"id":352,"date":"2017-07-27T23:44:22","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T06:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lucasmagder.com\/blog\/?p=352"},"modified":"2017-10-30T08:50:08","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T15:50:08","slug":"trust-people-when-they-say-write-games-not-engines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lucasmagder.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/trust-people-when-they-say-write-games-not-engines\/","title":{"rendered":"Trust people when they say “write games not engines”"},"content":{"rendered":"

...unless you really like writing engines, which I do.<\/p>\n

I never got around to posting about this project since I was kind of waiting for it to be something cooler, but a couple of years in of working on it once in a while the amount of work left kind of hit me. In the depths of my broken animation blending code I was like \"wait, what am I even doing here? this is not even close to being a dungeon crawler\" So behold: \"Frosting\", another one thrown on the pile of unfinished engines!<\/p>\n

The genesis of this project started back before I had spent time with Unreal and had only really worked on the NV-in-house engine and Cryptic's engine. The NV engine or \"NVDemo\" as we called it had pretty advanced rendering features since our projects were maybe 85% rendering\/shader code, 10% menus, 10% demo\/attract mode logic, but it didn't have much in the way of anything else and it was geared towards small scenes, so no real streaming, networking, game logic, etc.<\/p>\n

I happened to come across an article about the high-level design of the Unreal 1 networking architecture (since eaten by the internet) and thought \"wow this is a whole other can of worms than what I've worked on so far!\" also I found this article on draw call management Order your graphics draw calls around!<\/a> Doing it exactly like this doesn't make much sense in the era of Vulkan and friends, but at the time it seemed fancy. Plus, I didn't like this thing, or that thing with our system at work and wanted to try my crack at a clean slate.<\/p>\n

My goal was to build a realtime hack-and-slash rougelike, but mostly I just got a bunch of test levels and crates you can knock over \ud83d\ude42 Since I knew the least about the non-graphics stuff I started with that which is why the rendering is so basic, no shadows, directional light etc. Otherwise I might accidentally make a rendering engine again and end up with no gameplay. I didn't really get that far but it had some neat features:<\/p>\n