Hacker News Reader

Comment by atroll | Hacker News Reader

those are real gamedevs

At the time this was released, the game performed terribly (as in, incredibly slowly) on all but most advanced PCs. The "real gamedevs" (such as Carmack) were trying to optimize for performance and working on the most possible hardware configurations. Stuff like Quake was impressive not just because of good gameplay, but also how smooth it ran even on really shit machines.

> At the time this was released, the game performed terribly (as in, incredibly slowly) on all but most advanced PCs.

So it is a Crytek engine? That joke held itself for ages.

> The "real gamedevs" (such as Carmack) were trying to optimize for performance and working on the most possible hardware configurations.

There are many different kinds of gamedevs and many games never made it past their one target platform or sucked on anything else, in addition third party console ports often end up horrible.

Not to forget that the true heroes are often the driver developers that have to add game specific hacks to make the bundle of undefined behavior that the gamedevs call a game both run and look like it didn't come from the uncanny valley.

I played it on a 250$ (and years old) desktop when .kkreiger came out and it worked great.

No, those are real demodevs.

Games are not about technical superiority - they're about having fun and projecting stories and emotions, just like any other art form.

Tell that to the AAA market.

AAA games often project emotions too - just a different _kind_ of emotions. Just because Modern Warfare is a different experience than Inside or Fez doesn't mean you don't feel anything when playing it. There's plenty of place in the world for all kinds of games.

I don't get the hate for CoD. I played all but last Modern Warfare installments and really liked the single-player campaign!

I know the spin-offs catch a lot of shit—and the first Black Ops was awful—but Black Ops II, for all its problems, does more interesting stuff in both its single- and multi-player than I've seen in another console FPS since Perfect Dark.

[EDIT] though, to be clear, still far less than Perfect Dark did.

>just like any other art form

That implies that making something technically impressive, like .kkrieger, isn't an art form.

Technical quality and artistic quality are orthogonal, though the former can have an influence on the latter.

I'm not sure I'd agree there. Both programming and traditional art are creative disciplines. I'd argue that any creative discipline can be treated as an art.

I may have misread the comment that you originally replied to; my reading of golergka's original comment was simply to put .kkrieger in the correct context.

We expect certain things from games, and .kkrieger doesn't deliver on that front. In the context of the demoscene, it delivers in spades.

I thought you were originally objecting to the reclassification of the .kkreiger developers, gamedev -> demodev. A second reading suggests that maybe they don't consider .kkrieger to be art, in which case I disagree.

No, they're real gamedevs. Much like Richard Garriott, they built their own tools, unlike every AAA company out there using someone elses engine.

These guys did the ALL of the work from the ground up. That's REAL development.

I don't want to start a philosophical argument here about what a "real dev" is, but I do want to provide a counterpoint to any potential gamedevs who may be reading this:

While writing your own engine from scratch can sound tempting, and absolutely is a rewarding excercise, if your goal is to publish a game, it's probably wise to not do this. Pick up gamemaker or godot or unity and start prototyping right away.

I might have a bit of a bias here, but I spend a not-insignificant amount of time on an online gamedev community, and the only people who ever finish anything are the guys using gamemaker and unity. Everyone else gets stuck at the "should I use regular inheritance or components/what's the best way to z-order sprites/Delta time coefficients cause random bugs in physics" stage and cannot proceed because their engine becomes unstable.

If you have the skills and time, and feel like it is necessary to write your own engine for your game, then by all means, but I think that for most people, these prerequisites don't exist.

"Real dev" or not, once you shipped your game, you've done more than most devs.

I 1000% agree with this. At the same time, I think developing your own engine is immensely empowering and helps you "level up" in some fashion. I'd recommend doing both. But, of course, just use an existing engine and make a game first. The engine is a long haul endeavor. It starts very slowly, but eventually, you'll be able to roll your own games with it. And there's something about that that's very cool. But don't write an entire engine for your first or even second game.

So real real game developers should ship their own operating system to run the game on. As well as their own hardware. Because all the others are just using someone else's and are lazy.

Sorry, but doing more work just for the sake of doing more work is not something that's impressive. It's merely a waste of time. For .kkrieger the technical achievement of fitting that much in so little space is definitely impressive, but dismissing developers that were using a licensed engine is pointless. Most games are built with finite time and money. If you can build a better game by allocating money somewhere you'd otherwise have spent time at the expense of part of the game, then that's a net win in my eyes, and doesn't diminish the result in the slightest.

"So real real game developers should ship their own operating system to run the game on. As well as their own hardware. Because all the others are just using someone else's and are lazy."

I believe there's rules on HN regarding unwarranted snark. You very obviously missed the entire point of what I said so there's no point in trying to explain.

I'd like to point out that I work at one of the largest(if not the largest) gamedev company in the world and 100% of our projects use our own engines.

Unless you believe that every single game should write its own engine from scratch, then I don't know what to say about that, it's just extremely obvious that it's not feasible for every project regardless of whether you have 100 or 10000 people working at your company.

I have enormous respect for these guys for everything they do, but condemning someone for using a third-party engine that works fine instead of reinventing the wheel is silly. Some people love and excel at making engines; some people love and excel at making content. We need both.

> No, those are real demodevs.

You say that as if it is a pejorative. In many ways, the demo scene is more demanding of excellence than game development.

Yes, there are differences in priorities between demos and games, but by creating a technically excellent demo that is also a game that "plays really well", they've shown that they are "demodevs" who are also "gamedevs".

And art comes in many forms. Besides the obvious visual/animation/audio artistic aspects of demos, the awe felt at the technical superiority of a great software demo is very similar to the inspirational effects of great physical architecture, but not everyone feels that emotion.

The Taj Mahal is a physical "demo" that demonstrates great "technical superiority", but even people who don't care for architecture tend to recognize it as art.

"Demodev" is not a pejorative? I didn't read that into it. Although the proper term would be "democoder"! :)

On the other hand, yes of course demos are also about "technical superiority", as well as "having fun and projecting stories and emotions". Just in a different sense than games are, which is the part that's "just like any other art form" ;-)

Weird that so many demoscene programmers work in games...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com