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Comment by enbugger | Hacker News Reader

> So, if you want to build games using raylib, why not learn learning or use Swift for that?

Never ever worked for me. Imagine, you actually learned basic Swift and Raylib, now you want "advanced" features in your game like navigation/pathfinding, model loading, ImGui, skeletal animation (those are actually vital for gamedev). You realize that

- Navigation is only ReCast which is pure C++ library,

- ImGui has C++ API as first-class citizen,

- Decent animation with compression is only open-sourced by OzzAnimation which is pure C++ project.

For gamedev interfacing with C is never enough, half of ecosystem is built heavily on C++. Even C++ interop is not enough (see Dlang). Without all those libraries you are bound to make boring 2d platformers.

Same for Zig, Odin, C3 etc.

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> Without all those libraries you are bound to make boring 2d platformers.

Perhaps if you're completely devoid of imagination.

It is in fact possible to make video games without deferring to open-source libraries for every single aspect of it.

It's also industry standard to do so. I don't think I've ever seen a team outsource something like pathfinding. Maybe in the Unity/Unreal space, which I'm very unfamiliar with. Dependencies are generally speaking not viewed as a good thing. They become vanishingly rare outside of certain things like physics engines, sound engines, vegetation, etc. And usually higher quality proprietary ones are chosen over OSS (though this is changing with physics engines in particular, mostly thanks to Bullet)

NIH is a cultural pillar. Even scripting layers are relatively split on if they're in-house or not. It's not uncommon to find both an in-house fork of Lua + a few other completely custom scripting engines all serving their own purpose.

From https://recastnav.com :

> Industry Standard - Recast powers AI navigation features in Unity, Unreal, Godot, O3DE and countless AAA and indie games and engines

I see the industry is of full double standards :)

https://www.mobygames.com/group/9867/middleware-recast/

It's not a terribly long list, it seems, even if it's non-exhaustive.

> I see the industry is of full double standards

Absolutely, and that's why it's so great. No two companies are going to look the same. The culture of the video games industry is a rather unique one that's kept its archipelago syndrome alive against all odds. It'll be a sad day if that ever changes.

Pathfinding middleware has traditionally been a thing though, e.g. apart from the mentioned ReCast (which is the popular free solution) the commercial counterpart was PathEngine (looks like they are even still around: https://pathengine.com/overview/).

If you need to do efficient path finding on random triangle geometry (as opposed to running A* on simple quad or hex grids) it quickly gets tricky.

What has undeniably declined is the traditional "10k US-$ commercial middleware". Today the options are either free and open source (which can be extremely high quality, like Jolt: https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics) or fully featured engines like Godot, Unity or UE - but little inbetween those "extremes".

> Today the options are either free and open source (which can be extremely high quality, like Jolt: https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics)

I did mention this was changing in particular with physics engines. That being said, proprietary dependencies still reign supreme in places like audio engines. Something like OpenAL isn't really a replacement for FMOD or Wwise. I know those off-the-shelf engines roll their own replacements, but then they also roll their own pathfinding and navmesh generation as far as I know.

I've seen people genuinely wonder how one would go about making a 2D platformer without a generalized third-party physics engine—as though every single classic 2D platformer didn't have its own simple, bespoke physics simulation!

There are entire classes (even genres) of video games that don't require substantial third-party library support, and it's frustrating to see that this seems to be more and more of a minority view as time goes on.

> Same for Zig, Odin, C3 etc

Not a game but similar in terms of programming, all of JangaFX's products (which do very impressive visual effects in real time) are made with Odin.

Yes, it's perhaps easier to glue C++ libs together but C libraries are enough for doing graphics and games.

> ImGui has C++ API as first-class citizen

Dear ImGui via the C bindings is actually quite nice and not much less convenient than the C++ API (the only notable difference is that the C API has no overloads and default params).

E.g. here's a control panel UI (from the below ozz-animation sample) with the 'Dear Bindings' approach (using a custom 'ig' prefix)):

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/d8429d701eb7a8c...

Dear ImGui is a bit of an outlier for C++ libraries though, since it is essentially a C API wrapped in a namespace.

OzzAnimation is also fairly trivial to wrap in an (abstracted) C API, for instance I use this in some of the sokol-samples:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/libs/ozz...

Implementation: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/libs/ozz...

...used in this sample:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/sapp/shd...

...WASM live version:

https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/shdfeatures-sapp.html

TL;DR: quite a few C++ libraries out of the game-dev world are actually quite easy to access from C or languages that can talk to C APIs, mainly because the game-dev world typically uses a very 'orthodox' subset of C++ (no or very restricted C++ stdlib usage, no rtti, no exceptions, ideally no smart pointers in the public API).

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