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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly - I think you can have one of many frameworks serving that glue/structure role, and not all games would need it.

I also think you're over-estimating how much of a "beast" you need as a minimal structure for building a game around. I have built a lot of hobby games, and if you're not trying to make an AAA game, you can get really far with a simple game loop, and a few single-header libraries for things like audio and asset loading.

That would be one of the advantages of a more modular approach: you could choose a right-size solution rather than working from the assumption that you need this hugely complex monolith to build off of, and potentially not needing a lot of that complexity.

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> I also think you're over-estimating how much of a "beast" you need as a minimal structure for building a game around. I have built a lot of hobby games, and if you're not trying to make an AAA game, you can get really far with a simple game loop

It’s an organization/people problem. Eventually if your tiny hobby game engine gets big enough people start trying to use it to make the equivalent of AAA games. Then either those users (or your investors if you’ve gone that route like Unity did), start pushing you to support those edge cases.

Eventually your elegant modular code is dwarfed by the all the edge case handling that got crammed into the framework—either because it was so performance critical that it had to live there or (the more likely case) because it was much faster to hamjam it in than spend time thinking about how best to architect it.

Idk I think you are describing a way a modular approach can fail, but I'm fairly confident you could find a way to modularize game development to a much greater degree than is currently achieved.

I think you could, but I just don’t know how long it would last. The real benefit of microservices in most cases is that the network acts as an externally enforced boundary layer.

There’s no reason the vast majority of time that you need to pay the overhead of using network calls to enforce your boundaries. Yet time an again you see companies willing to pay the microservices tax because it’s just so hard organizationally to enforce modular boundaries over time.

>The real benefit of microservices in most cases is that the network acts as an externally enforced boundary layer.

Then we have the scalability, then we have composability, then we have different security models, then we have code isolation.

There are many advantages to a microservice model. But that doesn't mean the microservice model is good for a game, unless it is backend code.

You couldn't imagine a package-driven ecosystem like npm or cargo catching on for game-dev?

An npm like ecosystem sounds absolutely horrible. It’s also not what I thought you were talking about.

Many (most?) software engineers (most?) cringe at the state of the npm ecosystem—even if they hold their nose and participate in it. I definitely wouldn’t consider that an improvement to the state of game dev software engineering practices.

I think there are some problems with package managers, and with the culture around NPM in particular, but I think almost everyone would agree that simple and standardized code reuse has been a massive boon to software engineering as a whole.

Do you dislike cargo as well or just npm for some reason?

It's more a question about degree. I don't mind an app having a few well vetted external dependencies. When it becomes common and accepted for a small application to contain thousands of 3rd party dependencies, I think we've gone way too far.

I've worked in languages that had large standard libraries where it was common to only include a few large commercial external dependencies, and I've worked with javascript and ruby on the other end of the spectrum.

I don't think one style has a clear productivity advantage over the other. Other than maybe at the very lowest levels of beginning software engineers (even then I'm unsure because of the decision paralysis common for beginners in these ecosystems).

As to the original point, however, Unity and other engines already have package managers and asset/code stores. What you're essentially asking for is for Unity to remove many of the features they already include and pull them out into packages. Now you're running up against many of the organizational issues I've already talked about. Not saying it's impossible, in my experience it's just not likely to work out long term.

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