Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

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short_sells_poo

There are some things that generalize in game development, mamy don't. How you implement a door can very much depend on the sort of game you are building. And it can absolutely get complicated simply by the fact that you'll likely need to hand roll your solutions.

I haven't worked in game dev in decades, but I remember that just network synchronization could be tricky because the degree to which a door is open could lead to very different outcomes in a game. Eg take a shooter game:

Does the door block/deflect bullets?

Yes? Well now you need to make sure to synchronize clients really cleverly because each player will see a different state of the door depending on their latency. Whether they can shoot through the opening is relative to each clients' reference frame.

Oh, just make the server decide you say? Well, now all your inputs have a perceptible delay because your client has to wait for confirmation from the server, or you'll often see jarring prediction error correction when the thing you predicted is wrong.

A huge amount of research and work has gone into this and yet there's still no silver bullet.

That you think this is all solved just says that you know very little of the problem area - which is ok - but then you should not be making broad and confident statements about it. A touch of humility doesn't hurt.

Except network issues were not mentioned in the video. Moving the goalposts.

It was just an example of conceptually simple things that are hard in games. Are you disagreeing with what I wrote?

Not at all. Network issues make everything in games more complicated, not just bullets going through doors.

Everything in games can be complicated: physics, doors, AI, network. Even the first line of that video description.

I think that just proves my original point: it's clickbait to single out doors as being exceptionally hard versus everything else in game design.

> I think that just proves my original point: it's clickbait to single out doors as being exceptionally hard versus everything else in game design.

That's a fair point, but I think the charitable reading of the title is that amongst all the complicated things, a conceptually simple object like a door can still be very deceptively complex.

I sometimes get an urge to work on the myriad of game ideas I've written down over the years. And every time I remind myself that what I really like is the "idea" of making a game, not the actual process. Because the actual process is a draining, thankless and often rage inducing process. The actual building of a game is 95% of the time spent on stupid little details like making a door work properly.

And it is for that reason that I really admire game developers, particularly indie ones. It takes an insane amount of willpower, mental fortitude and wits to take a game from idea to playable product. And you then have to contend with one of the most toxic and volatile consumer groups in existence.

> I sometimes get an urge to work on the myriad of game ideas I've written down over the years. And every time I remind myself that what I really like is the "idea" of making a game, not the actual process. Because the actual process is a draining, thankless and often rage inducing process. The actual building of a game is 95% of the time spent on stupid little details like making a door work properly.

Yeah, I agree. I actually started out learning programming as a pre-teen by making my own games. It can be a lot of fun at times, but a lot of frustration too, and I can see how the latter eclipses the former as as you scale into a more complex game and with a bigger team.

It's not an easy job that's for sure.

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