A Database for Game Engines | Hacker News Reader

A Database for Game Engines

enginesdatabase.com

33 pointsraytopia21 comments

This is a database of game engines, probably should change the title; very misleading otherwise. The website title itself is "Engines Database".

I was hoping for a greater formalization of ECS as a domain-specific database.

ECS to me is a subset of the binary relational data model & first order logic. Or at least expressible entirely in those terms.

An in-memory system optimized high performance munging of such relations, with super optimized joins etc. would be invaluable I think in game dev (or anywhere else seeking to declare and manage complex relationships in real time). Basically... Datalog for games... on a tick clock

But from what I've seen game developers often re-invent the wheel, or formulate things in very specific terms for performance reasons.

I do think Tim Sweeny is sorta grasping at bringing some DB concepts into games when he talks about bringing e.g. software transactional memory (STM) to game dev.

Fwiw my colleague is the author of https://github.com/wotbrew/relic and he started working on Incremental View Maintenance ~purely because he wants to build a simpler rogue-like :)

I like this a lot, though I'd rather see it in Rust.

The tarpit paper is a classic.

I've had similar thoughts about roguelikes etc. after watching my teenage son play DwarfFortress. Seems to me such a game could be written nicely & declaratively in these kinds of terms.

Right, that's where (at least for me) questions like, "What do we have to learn from Datalog?" feel interesting even if there answer is nothing. Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but losing that naivete is a process of learning.

I was as confused as well. Clicked on the first one thinking I was going to a game, using this "new database."

But I like the idea!

No we better get even more specific lest someone think the database is made out of game engines. "database containing information about various game engines"

I recently saw this (https://twitter.com/AndrewChenE/status/1709000257747739046) which made me wonder whether we're close to being able to build 3D games in the browser using well-known web technologies like React.

However, in practice, if you want to build a cross-platform game, what is a reasonable game engine that you can use? I have an idea for a top-down 3D game and since I've never done this before don't want to waste too much of my time getting started. Is there anything that uses Rust, or is that a bad idea and I should look for something that uses a scripting language and something more well-known like C++?

I selected Zig from the language dropdown and it suggests Unreal Engine. That doesn't seem right.

Fixed! Thanks for this comment, I haven't noticed I broke the ManyToMany queries from last time I was messing around the backend.

I'm not sure what the sorting criteria is but Godot belongs on the first page.

“A database of X” is the new “GitHub Awesome X”

Of course we have databases of officially-classified and registered things (taxonomy, nutrition, geology, package managers = databases of libraries), as well as arxiv, IDBNsb, IMdb. But now we have databases of online resources people have to go out and search for:

- This

- Programming Languages: https://pldb.pub

- Databases (software): https://dbdb.io

It’s only a matter of time until someone comes up with a database of databases of other things

Hey! Website creator here :) I honestly wasn't expecting someone to post the link to the site here so soon (I posted earlier as ShowHN but it flopped a bit haha). I'm reading all feedback now!

EDIT: As some people posted here, language programming tags are getting wrong queries. I'm looking into it rn, but other tags should be working!

EDIT 2: Just fixed it, I made a Django query oopsie from last time I was fixing the queries. Thanks for the feedback!

I was hoping to see high performance embedded database / knowledge management engines for games, but it's a database of game engines.

I selected Java as programming language and got a lot of engines that are not usable in Java. But the two main Java engines, LWJGL & LibGDX, that are present in the database were not on the list.

My bad! Some of the queries broke from last time I was messing around the code. It should be fixed now!

The programming language tags seem wrong...selected Typescript and it brought up PyGame and Unreal Engine, but not BabylonJS. BabylonJS also didn't appear for Javascript.

It was very wrong :^) I made a Django oopsie, should be fixed now

Arguably the most mature engine for building games for the web, Phaser (think Vampire Survivors), isn't even listed.

I wouldn't trust this list.

It is in the list though! The programming languages query was broken (should be fixed now), did that somewhat made you not find it? (Asking so I can improve the site UI)

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