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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

I'd be careful extending learnings from games (solo or team efforts) to general programming as the needs and intent seem to be so different. We rarely see much code re-use in games outside of core, special-purpose buy largely isolated components and assets. Outside of games there's a much bigger emphasis on the data IME, and performance is often a nice-to-have.

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Yeah - A game is (generally) a one and done enterprise. Like a start up it's all about getting it out the door, there's little to no expectation of having to maintain it for any real length of time.

HN has some hot takes but that one is particularly impressive.

Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Counter Strike . . . all very short term projects.

For every game like that, there are a thousand games that shipped, maybe got a few updates, and then they were done.

We can probably add to that the fact that the nominated titles almost certainly started out with spaghetti code that had to be refactored, reworked, and gave maintainers nightmares in their sleep

Roblox didn't have server functions until 2014 and they weren't mandatory until 2018. Anything the client did automatically replicated to every other client.

That meant I could attach Cheat Engine to Roblox, edit memory addresses to give myself in-game cash, and inject whatever code I wanted to everyone else.

Thankfully it was sandboxed so I couldn't give people viruses.

This was probably a good decision because most of Roblox's best games from that period weren't updated to use server functions. It's too difficult.

This comment assumes game companies throw away all their code and start from scratch on their next title. Which is completely untrue, games are built on decades old code, like most software. There is absolutely a need for maintainable code.

I think that there might be a distinction on indie vs big publishers (like EA) - I would expect someone like EA to enforce coding standards, but they do so whilst living off the income of previous hits.

It's been mixed moving to normal code: I haven't had to low-level optimise for ages now (man I miss that). But performance in the O() sense has been the same.

Game engine development is very much about processing of data. The pipeline is long and the tree is wide. Being able to reason about complicated data processing topologies mapped very easily across.

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