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Anon is a game dev (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

Normal maps are pretty easy to make, they're just time-intensive.

[-] [email protected] 176 points 1 week ago

Anon is not entirely wrong though... we have become pretty lazy regarding optimizing software.

[-] [email protected] 109 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Companies don't want to invest in creating their own engine anymore, so now we get unoptimized unreal engine games now.

[-] [email protected] 57 points 1 week ago

If you have the talent and manpower to create your own engine, it’s better business to make that engine your product instead of whatever game you wanted to make.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

The advantage of making your own engine is that you can specialize for your specific gameplay.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

If your game is something that needs it, definitely go for it.

Something like Noita comes to mind

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Factorio to i believe

[-] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago

I disagree here, making an engine you'd sell must be top notch in every aspect (or close to), an in-house engine only needs to get the job done for your game. Probably two orders of magnitude in needed workforce, depending on your needs ofc.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Very very few actual profitable companies roll their own engines.

Supercell has their own, but it’s because they started before there was anything available.

Indie games make their own engines but it’s more of a hobby or passion project, not something that can employ two dozen people to develop it.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

From Software and Hideo Kojima would disagree. The highest form of passion for your game is to create an engine that gives it the exact gameplay formula you want it to have.

Of course corporate greedfucks cannot understand this, they only care about how many villas and yachts the profits will get them.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

It’s not really that great of a business.

Epic is estimated to have made $275M revenue on Unreal engine in 2023, vs $4.7B on Fortnite

Unity made $614M revenue on engine & tools in 2024, in ads and monetization they made $1.2B

These are stable industry standard engines, if you start work on your challenging engine today it’ll take years to develop, gain game-developers interest and trust. And still you’re competing with giants that use their engines as loss-leaders.

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[-] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

its harder to hire new devs if engine is built in house, because no one outside the company understands how to use said engine unless its open for the public to use. thats the biggest drawback of in house engines (other than the increased develepment life cycle to develop one)

its why for example, many 3rd party ports/remasters of old games use unity for example.

Using an inhouse engine makes sense only if you can retain a lot of talent. or have several projects that use it as a base.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Or your engine can do something that’s hard to do with Godot, Unity or Unreal

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Which is increasingly unlikely.

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's not the problem. But why spend time and money to optimize your assets if the gamers will buy better hardware instead and you can even strike a deal with a big vendor.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

There is also the fact that graphic reached the point where marginal improvments require disproportionate amount of firepower.

Plus the im pretty sure that a lot of new features are made moreso to ease the work of developers and graphics improvments are nice side effects ( i think i read that ray tracing lightining is actually easier to do , alghtough you do need hybrid solutions while the games do not require ray tracing but that part is changing and we do have first games that require ray tracing ) . I think thats the reason we see a small renesance of AA games at this moment.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

you have access to unreal engine source code, the problem is companies don't want to pay people to optimize engine

[-] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago

It's not laziness, it's bottom line and chasing the dollar. Management doesn't give a shit about optimization, just MVP (minimum viable product). Speaking as a developer, the mindset of 'we will fix it after deployment' is fucking everywhere.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

It's also diminishing returns of investment. The more realistic you want to go, the more work you have to put in. Also more realism will mean certain other things will look even more jarring, so you're having a much higher standard for bugfixes.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Well yes, obviously it's a balancing act when making things look good, but optimization is about making what is there run well, not look better.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Except in 99.9% of cases nothing gets fixed after deployment either. That's just an excuse not to admit that from the get-go.

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[-] [email protected] 146 points 1 week ago

That's the HD remaster that came out like 10 years ago. They most certainly did not make that on windows 98.

[-] [email protected] 81 points 1 week ago

It also helps that the game uses locked perspective scenes.

[-] [email protected] 71 points 1 week ago

Not just that, but prerendered backgrounds, too.

All games could look like this if they got 48 hours to render each frame and their entire realtime render budget went to three character models, total and nothing else.

I mean, I dispute that games don't look better than that in the first place, too. Grainy embedded screenshot aside, the RE1 remake definitely doesn't look any better, even with all that, than the newer remakes.

[-] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago

Just to nitpick, the HD remaster is a remaster of the 2002 remake, so it's a bit older than 10 years.

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[-] [email protected] 98 points 1 week ago

I will never understand the obsession around graphics. JUST MAKE IT FUN.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 6 days ago

Here’s the reason AAA devs are obsessed with graphics:

It’s the only thing that differentiates them from indie devs.

Once you realize that indie devs can do anything and everything that a AAA game can do, except for creating tons of high detail 3D models, levels, and textures, you begin to see the AAA studio’s dilemma. If they don’t hire all those artists, level designers, and animators then they’re forced to compete with indie devs on gameplay, story, and features — none of which they can do!

Why is that? Because there are millions of indie game devs out there who are willing to spend many years of their lives trying out ideas that have close to zero chance of being successful and all the gamers out there are happy to pick that one in a million game which actually succeeds! For a AAA studio to step into that arena would be absolutely foolish.

It’s the same reason big corporations dominate book publishing but they don’t even bother trying to write books themselves.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I will never understand the obsession around computer-crashingly good graphics. They push your temps to the max and computer components don't start throttling themselves until the temps are a little too high so that your shit will stop working sooner so you have to buy a new gpu sooner. Why can't they let us control the thermal throttling temp, huh? Fuck that 99 degree celsius shit. "99c is acceptable temps for laptops and gpus" my ass.

Pixel art isn't a necessarily a positive selling point to me but if the game is good and the graphics are good enough to be able to tell what's going on without having to get high on drugs first, then its fine by me. Ps2 or xbox 360 era 3d graphics are the sweet spot though. I'm glad they finally added actual graphics to Dwarf Fortress, it's actually playable now. If the msdos installation process has better graphics then a game then that's pushing things little too far imho.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

yep. Elden Ring is an example... cant even play that game without my fans going nuts. I didnt even buy the DLC expansion yet... taking a break until I get a better PC. Being a patient gamer means always having cool games to look forward to, someday far in the future lol

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Seriously, way too many games are just generic garbage that advertise only on "look how realistic my game is, you're not a true gamer if the games you play don't make your computer sound like a jet engine!"

[-] [email protected] 44 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Graphics can be part of the fun. What's so difficult to understand?

[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

Good graphics are fine, but not at the expense of creativity and fun.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

And the most fun graphics are stylized graphics!

[-] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

Graphics and jiggly physics.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

some ps2 games had boob jiggle physics.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

If it's just the tits, it's not physics; it's fetish.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago
[-] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

don't forget the dick and balls, I don't

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[-] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago

Am I stupid? Don't a lot games look like this in real time rendered graphics nowadays? What's anon talking about.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

Only if you like smudges due to upscaling and TAA.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Yeah seriously, anyone can make beautiful prerendered graphics that look good running on any game system released in the past ~20 years (which is what RE1 uses). Doing in realtime is the hard part.

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I noticed that too, but I do think that the anon is talking about the remaster since he's also talking about Windows 98 and the remaster was out in 2002 while the original game was out in 1996. I know fuck all about the production of the remake, but maybe windows 98 was all they had available to them and maybe they did draw all the textures themselves for it. It'd have to look into that, though.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

I blame REmake for my impossibly high standards of what a remake should be

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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
524 points (96.6% liked)

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