After listening to this …
I think in 20 years there will be a shortage of engine level programmers. I wasted a lof of time learning how things work. With a working framework already available, people won’t have a reason to do the same.
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I just see Unity and the like as tools, you want to make game then you learn the tools at your disposal. If you want to know how the tool was created and make your own thats another job.
It’s like asking a writer to write is book with ink and paper instead of just using a computer, i don’t think much of them care about how keyboard are made. It’s an extreme example but it’s the same in any job anyway, new tools comes with technology that make part of the work faster and sometimes replace human altogether (that’s another problem).
I don’t think many dev think like that anymore especially in younger generation, it’s just that the dev job is still “young” and yet evolve very quickly. Nowdays the number of dev tool altogether is so large (not just game but web, app, security, database …) and we need to specialize on specific ones to even stay updated.
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Or there will be a limited number of engines out there lovingly crafted by those niche few programmers who really love that kind of thing.
There will always be somebody who loves a particular technical aspect of whatever programming is going on. You look at the worldwide population possibilities as the internet makes so much available to so many places, you’re going to end up with people who really want to dig down deep and see how everything works.
I may only understand the basics of how my car engine works and how to keep it running properly because that’s what I need to drive it successfully, but there are those other folks who will happily take it down to the component parts on their dining room table just for fun … and then figure out how to make it better, faster, or just more fun.
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This is not mutually exclusive with shortage of game engine programmers. Also those few niche programmers may make it incomprehensible for everybody else.
What I meant is that I see that guy’s point. When I learned programming… you kinda had do have curiosity, desire to take things apart, and learn how they work by poking them with a stick. One of the “computers” I worked with was programmed by typing numbers into it. Without mnemonics. And that was fun.
Right now, we have frameworks… which are actually a logical evolution of how things were going. However, the original “Take the clock apart” thing seems to be dying and eventually it will be gone. And I’m not sure how to feel about it, because it was kinda important for my learning process.
So, frameworks make sense. Making things easier for others.makes sense.
However, something was certainly lost in the process.
And speaking of car engines…
Do you know anyone personally who made their own TV from scratch? Say… thirty or forty years ago that wasn’t that surprising.
On a more serious note, I believe that the best course of action would be something
I guess the more proper example could be how musicians make their own music.
For majority of talented musicians, it’s often the case that all they need to create an original song is an instrument, a piano, or a guitar that most other musicians might use.
However, there are a few exceptions, who insist that they must have a very specific type of instrument to fully express their musical talents. There are many players who only play an oddly configured, or even unique type of an instrument, like a scalloped guitar, 12 string bass, and etc.
I suppose it’s essentially the same with any creative activities where originality is regarded as an important value. It is true that there are many game developers who can create quality games by utilizing what is already given by the game engine. But there are always others who like to search for a new method, or even build their own tools or frameworks to try something entirely different.
There wouldn’t be games like Minecraft, for example, if everyone just relied on what popular game engines already provide, trying to outperform their competitors only in quality but not in originality.
So, I think it’s just a matter of a choice, not of right or wrong.
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Things are just getting way too complicated to be able to do it today, when engines have three million lines of code and modern TV’s can only be machine manufactured. Everything has become highly specialised.
Even cars are highly calibrated machines controlled by computers, ECU controls every single portion of it and even fuel / air regulation is controlled by a slurry of sensors from MAF’s to MAP’s…
Trying to take them apart completley is generally too much for one person to take on.
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It doesn’t need to be creating something like the whole Unity engine from scratch. It might be a very specialized game engine instead, like the case with Minecraft, or even can be a Unity plugin, that extends its functionalities in a very specific area.
And especially with such an active and large community of open source developers today, they can easily write million LOC projects in a few years, provided there’s sufficient demand and interest.
We have seen many paradigm changes, in other fields of software development, during which many big open source projects constantly emerge and sink into oblivion. So, I don’t think that the game industry would remain to the exception to such a trend forever.
A skilled musician should be able to compose without an instrument, provided a piece of paper and a pencil. instrument helps, but it is possible to do without.
There are also two different approaches to composing music - inspirational and methodical. Inspiration means banging your head against the wall (figuratively speaking) till you “catch the muse”, hear the music and write it down, while methodical means constructing the music using rules of harmony (pretty much similar to programming).
What you speak of instruments… people that specialize in something unusual are extremely rare, BUT usually people prefer playing their own instrument. (“this is my violin. There are many like it, but this one is mine…”). The reason for that is that an instrument often acquires a bit of “character” as time goes on, and with your own instrument you kinda know every quirk it might have.
Going back to game engine analogy, you could compare that with grabbing a generic engine and then adding tools to make your life easier. People who make their own instruments to play are pretty much unheard of.
As for Minecraft example… most of the things people come up with can be stuffed into an existing framework. Ludum Dare 37 had very interesting “Recursive Dollhouse” and “Non-euclidian Room” entries which feature what people would usually expect to be impossible in unity engine. In the end there wasn’t much of a logical reason for Notch to write minecraft from scratch.
@neginfinity Instruments like a 6-string bass, or scalloped guitar that I took for an example are not something musicians choose to play, simply because they want to feel ownership of a special instrument.
Rather, those are such type of instruments that people use to explore extra musical possibility they provide. As I emphasized in the text you quoted, they are not necessary for most of other musicians to create good music. But on the other hand, there are small number of musicians who use them to create very original kind of music, in which the use of such a specialized instruments are essential.
Steve Vai would still be a sick guitar player even without all those effects he uses, or Cher’s Believe might still have been a hit, even if she didn’t used Autotune in such a creative manner. But if they didn’t, probably people would remember them as much less original artists than they do now. There’s no reason to tell them, “hey, it’s silly to use that gigantic effector stack, as there are tons of great guitar players who can play well without it”, or “you know, it’s is just for people who can’t sing, so obviously you don’t need it”, and etc.
I do believe that Unity is a great game engine. But I’m pretty positive that, before it came to the market, there were people who thought they already had everything they needed to create great games, so there’s no need for another such product to complicate things.
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Are you saying that unity shouldn’t have existed ? 
I mean who needs a car? People can travel on foot just fine - like they did before horses.
While there were people who had everything they needed to create, a good programmer does not necessarily make a good designer, good artist, good modeler and a good composer. Before unity came to market, people had to either waste a lot of time learning aspects of programming (by the time they learn programming, original idea they had will be probably dead), trying to team up with someone (Hey, guys! We have an amazing idea, we’ll TOTALLY secure funding for it! I’m SURE!), etc.
Right now people who COULDN’T make a game back then, CAN do it.
I think you must have misread my posts, because now you are saying basically the same things as I am.
The whole point of my post that you initially quoted was that there CAN be special cases where people may want to extend or recreate tools they use like Unity.
Then you argued against it by saying that musicians don’t need to create their instruments or Minecraft could be created using existing technology, and such.
So, I said people always keep trying to do things differently, and they discover new requirements that they didn’t know even existed before.
To emphasize the point, I said there might have been such people who had everything they needed to create games before Unity existed, thus fail to realize how such a product could make it even easier for them.
If you read it as I denied the usefulness of Unity, probably it’s either that you didn’t read my post carefully, or my English proficiency failed again to clearly convey what I really meant.
By the way, people who created their own instruments are not ‘unheard of’, as Les Paul, Brian May, Eddie Van Halen all created their own special guitars to achieve a specific sound, just to name a few among the guitarists alone.
Your the creator… Sometimes you want to go deeper, sometimes you just cheat. The result that counts. There’s nothing wrong to get some stuff from assetstore, (maybe adjust it). But to just cheat on everything is another thing, and will not lead to good result.
Example, if i don’t find the sound effect i am looking for, i use my quality microphone and create it from scratch from nature…
Question is, did your project have your fingerprint? Or a fingerprint from some one else?