In my spare time, I've been tinkering with my own game engine for as long as I can remember (10+ years) and although I never envisaged it as being the latest and greatest, I'd still like to think that it might be used for little some game at some point.

With Unreal Engine 5 out and looking leagues ahead of anything I've seen before, let alone anything I'd be even remotely capable of building, does anyone in the same situation feel like just giving up on their own effort?

People say write games instead of engines but I still enjoy the challenge of building my own engine. I guess that should keep me going but when you watch Nanite in action and then go back to your own engine, any further work feels a bit futile.

(Edit: this should have probably been posted in the Lounge, please feel free to move it as I don't seem to be able to…)

RobMadison said:
With Unreal Engine 5 out and looking leagues ahead of anything I've seen before, let alone anything I'd be even remotely capable of building, does anyone in the same situation feel like just giving up on their own effort?

Nope, I'm still going with my own engine. I'm just an engine-developer at heart, nothing gives me as much joy as solving some complex technical issue, even if proprietary engines already have the solution. That being said, I did take a few design-ideas from unreal (mainly their visual interface for blueprints), but I'm never gojng to stop working on my own engine no matter what.

This is my exact feeling, its impossible for a single man to compete with unreal where dozen pof programmers work on every single aspect of the entire engine infrastrucutre. Sooner or later, there will be no more reason to write engine not even for fun.

Programmer71 said:
Sooner or later, there will be no more reason to write engine not even for fun.

But isn't that a contradiction? Why would I stop doing something that is inherently fun to me? Its the same thing with video-games - it doesn't matter to me if there is a boost or some most efficient way to achieve something, as long as what I'm doing is fun to me I'll keep doing it.

Also, writing engines has technically been a waste of time for far longer. Early version of unity haven been out for over a decade, and before that, there was RPG-Maker. I could have already finished my game if I stuck with the Rpg-Maker, but I didn't, because rewriting it in my own engine just is more fun. There's the additional benefit of a better work-flow, but that could also be achieved (to a certain degree) with Unity or Unreal. So I don't see anything changing with Unreal 5 over Unreal 4 or Unity.

@Juliean I'm pretty sure I'm an engine developer at heart too. Setting about working on a new feature and trying to figure out the best way to do it and chipping away at it until it looks right is a real buzz for me. Funny, if I actually think about how much work is involved in getting a AAA game ready, I feel way worse about my engine but if I just think of it as something I do as a hobby, it makes it feel far more achievable. Especially when I look at the likes of Unreal Engine 5. Looking through the Unreal Engine 4 code is good for seeing how things are done by others but I have to really limit my exposure to it otherwise I start feeling a bit futile about mine again.

@programmer71 I think it helps to just not think about the enormity of the task ahead of us and just enjoy it for what it is, a learning experience and a bit of fun. It helps to see that people are still asking questions on GameDev about their engines and that they're obviously not swayed by pixel-sized polygons.

Writing your own engine definitely feels like a balancing game, you seem to have to keep things ahead of you that are achievable otherwise it just feels insurmountable.

Juliean said:

Programmer71 said:
Sooner or later, there will be no more reason to write engine not even for fun.

But isn't that a contradiction? Why would I stop doing something that is inherently fun to me? Its the same thing with video-games - it doesn't matter to me if there is a boost or some most efficient way to achieve something, as long as what I'm doing is fun to me I'll keep doing it.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Juliean said:

Also, writing engines has technically been a waste of time for far longer. Early version of unity haven been out for over a decade, and before that, there was RPG-Maker.

Not to mention Games Factory, Klik & Play and ZZT! And I'm sure there are several others. There has always been some means to do what you want to do, in a way you don't want to do it, or with compromises. I enjoy making stuff as I want it, how I want it.

I know several people who build cars. Building ones' own car has likely become too tedious relative to the cost of a new car for a while.
They're still enjoying it though…

RobMadison said:
@Juliean I'm pretty sure I'm an engine developer at heart too. Setting about working on a new feature and trying to figure out the best way to do it and chipping away at it until it looks right is a real buzz for me. Funny, if I actually think about how much work is involved in getting a AAA game ready, I feel way worse about my engine but if I just think of it as something I do as a hobby, it makes it feel far more achievable. Especially when I look at the likes of Unreal Engine 5. Looking through the Unreal Engine 4 code is good for seeing how things are done by others but I have to really limit my exposure to it otherwise I start feeling a bit futile about mine again.

I guess it does depend on how good your engine actually is - or lets rather say how happy you are with it. Personally, I'm extermely happy with what I have achieved. For me, my engine is technically on a level with at least Unity (citation/proof needed), and what I'm mainly lacking is content. I focus mostly on 2D, so I only have a very basic 3D renderer. But adding a more complex renderer would be an extension of the engine via a plugin, not a complete rewrite. I know this is all very subjective and I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or anything - I just want to make the point that you can certainly achieve a certain level of confidence in your own engine, even if pure “content” (in terms of 3 different renderers, lighting-modes etc…) you will obviously never be able to compete with the big ones.

SuperVGA said:
I know several people who build cars. Building ones' own car has likely become too tedious relative to the cost of a new car for a while. They're still enjoying it though…

My point exactly! As long as you do something for recreational purposes, it doesn't matter if its inefficent. Of course, if your main goal was to make project XYZ, and that alone, then writing an engine would not be a productive use of time (just as building your own car for the purpose of being able to drive to work would be a waste of time).

I certainly wouldn't try to write generic 3D game engine with a focus on realistic graphics.

If I were to write a game engine “for fun”, I would try to go for the specific and the unconventional. There is actually a fairly big scene of smaller engines that managed to find their own communities. Engines like Voxatron (completely voxel-based, no support at all for 2D graphics, no even in the UI) and Solarus (specialized for 2D Zelda-likes) can still beat the likes of Unreal in their own tiny niches.

Yes, it can be a bit demoralising when you see new tech like that; difficult to not be wooed by the graphics. There are still a lot of other parts to it though that it's still fun learning to write your own.

When you are doing it as a hobby progress is slow going which can make it difficult to remain motivated. If you do about 5 - 8 hours over a weekend it really doesn't add up to much over the course of a year; you can end up spending quite a few elapsed months just working on tooling for example. There is a simplicity that you know how each part is working in your own engine whereas they'll be millions of lines of code in the commercial solutions.

You can get pretty decent looking results with the PBR based pipelines, it's good to try and work on other aspects of the engine to keep things fresh. The time it's taking maybe ray tracing will end up becoming the dominating render path in 10 years time or so time :D.

RobMadison said:
With Unreal Engine 5 out and looking leagues ahead of anything I've seen before, let alone anything I'd be even remotely capable of building, does anyone in the same situation feel like just giving up on their own effort?

After i saw first UE5 demo, i was shocked and had such thoughts a bit.

I worked on realtime GI for 10 years, and actually i work since 5 years on geometry. So just those same things they now have improved.
With lighting i still feel ahead, but the detail they showed really gave me doubts about my one man odyssey.
I don't do this just for fun, nor do i work on a whole engine or game. Actually i plan to offer my works to game industry if it works out well, which only makes sense if i have some advantage over state of the art solutions like UE.

I concluded to continue as planned, focusing on my strengths instead being envy about insane detail.
I'm convinced complexity will only grow and combining multiple approaches to solve individual problems, so any good invention should find its place.

Thinking about game development in general and not just myself, nobody should stop working on his own engine. Neither a AAA company with in house engine, nor a one man hobby dev, and nobody in between.
We all have a dream about games, and programming technology always was part of those games. If everybody uses the same engine, our little crisis of lacking ideas for new games will get worse, overall engineering skill will degrade, Epic will run out of young talents, this and monopoly will cause stagnation, finally gaming will die.

RobMadison said:
People say write games instead of engines

That's not what they say. They mean ‘Make games and reuse code base for the next, then you will get a proper engine as a result’. Pretty sure of that.

Just keep going! ; )

RobMadison said:
you watch Nanite in action and then go back to your own engine, any further work feels a bit futile.

If your excited about Nanite i propose you do your own. It's an example of brilliant simplicity IMO, so not that complicated. Epic is generous to share code, there will be talks at GDC, people analysing it, etc. So we don't have to start from zero and spend 10 years on it like they did. I think i could do it in 6 months or surely less than a year.

I really like it. It puts an end to the embarrassing and lazy practices of depending only on raw GPU brute force power, feeling like rockstar gfx programmers just from some low level optimizations. We deserve to be shocked, and we should learn from it.