[mbf1]

There's a really important point to grok: AAA titles are more about asset management and art than they are about coding. There is no silver bullet to simplifying the creation of games and artwork. Roblox is as close as you get today because it takes a ton of the work out of making many kinds of games and starts children with enough templates and community created free art to get rapidly started. Teens and young adults who started at Roblox have made some very impressive games: World // Zero, Arsenal, and Bee Swarm Simulator all come to mind.

If your game is close to a starting template, it makes it fast to create something fun and let you focus on iterating with players. The further you are, the more effort will be involved. At some point, the effort becomes equal or greater to the other platforms, however, most kids learning on Roblox don't have the skills to start with Unity or Unreal Engine.

Taking a step back and shifting markets back to GPU hardware, NVIDIA CUDA is Roblox of the GPGPU world - a single stop shop for really great templates and tools to get you 90% of the way to your scientific goal. That last 10% can actually be more like 90% if you're in an area where the platform is missing something (this is universally true for all platforms).

The computing industry is full of tradeoffs and people re-learning and re-creating patterns to solve similar problems to those that were solved 5, 10, 15, and 20 years prior.

[reader_mode]

> There's a really important point to grok: AAA titles are more about asset management and art than they are about coding

If that was true there wouldn't be so much logic and code bugs in AAA titles.

From what I've seen game industry has terrible software engineering practices - why have automated testing when your model is crunch to release and then leave a skeleton crew fixing the bugs after you shipped.

Also being stuck in C++ doesn't help either, an ecosystem with bizarrely the most complicated frameworks I've ever seen (eg. boost) and yet the worst tooling out of anything I've used (with comparable adoption rate).

[jaaron]

You're misunderstanding what the parent poster was saying: when working on a large AAA game, content management (art, game design, etc.) is as much a bottleneck as engineering efforts. And a number of those bugs you're concerned about are rooted in content too, not lower level engine bugs.

I've worked about half of my career in the game industry. I've practiced TDD and written automated tests (and frameworks) for desktop, web and mobile apps. Some of those have been in the medical industry where the testing is crucial. I say this to make it clear that I'm familiar with solid software engineering practices.

With that in mind, games are the hardest software I've encountered for writing automated tests. It's just notoriously difficult to do in an effective manner. It's not impossible, but it's incredibly difficult.

[Kapura]

Extremely bad take, from somebody who has clearly not worked in AAA games, but believes all the things that gamers post on reddit. A few points:

1) you can only test-driven-develop so much in games, and that line usually stops at the engine level because the game itself is in flux so much. Automated testing is confined to making sure that checkins build on every platform. Game dev engineering is fundamentally different than programming in other fields because the goal posts move constantly.

2) If an engineer writes code expecting there to be no more than 1024 physics objects in the system, tells the designers and artists this, but then they turn around put in 2000 colliding pieces of silverware on a dinner table "because it needs to feel like a big feast" is that an engineering problem, or an art and asset management problem? Because something like 80% of my bugs are shit like this.

3) Professional game codebases use their own styles (i hesitate to say dialects) of C++ that do the things we need them to do the ways we need to do them. We don't use anybody else's framework; all of the bonus stuff we're doing lives in macros that can be inspected if an issue arises. But, please don't push your language purism on anybody else. What a tired argument to have.

[flohofwoe]

You'll have to search very long to find a C++ game code-base that uses boost, game devs are not that stupid ;)

Also, Unity games are usually written in C# (I think it's quite safe to say that - overall - most games are not written in C++ but in C#), yet I've seen no data so far which would indicate that Unity games have any less problems than games written in C++ during production and after release (if anything, the opposite seems to be true, not for technological reasons, but because Unity is so much more beginner-friendly).

I'm no fan of C++ either, but blaming a programming language for bugs and quality problems without any counter examples at hand is a bit ridiculous.

[senko]

> From what I've seen game industry has terrible software engineering practices.

You'd be surprised. Here's a talk from Croteam on how they test their games and engine: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YGIvWT-NBHk

I'd wager all major engines are exhaustively tested.

Trouble is, there's combinatorial explosion of game state, user input, assets, scripted behaviour and engine, so there's a huge area to cover.

[meheleventyone]

> If that was true there wouldn't be so much logic and code bugs in AAA titles.

Those are pretty different concerns tackled by different groups of people on AAA projects. The art requirements can be an order of magnitude larger than the gameplay side of things. That doesn’t make the gameplay side of things easy.

[thom]

Feels like the inevitable rise of AI powered content generation will at least free up _some_ resources at some point, right?

[somehnrdr14726]

During the indie dev renaissance in the 2010's, procedurally generated content received a lot of investment and attention. (Today's marketers would call this AI generated content.)

The idea was that your small indie team could keep up with the big content demand since you had algorithms generating seemingly evergreen content for your players.

What happens in practice is that the players begin playing your game at a meta level, learning how the generative process itself works; effectively removing the benefit of procgen content. As an example, consider Spelunky which claims it can generate millions of unique caverns to explore. If you assess that claim visually, it's true. But watch the streamers play and you will see that they 'speak' the algorithm. By observing the shape of a cavern in one area of a map, they know the algorithm had to make a specific concession elsewhere in the map. So this content isn't really procedural for them anymore.

Even if the "AI" content generators get more intelligent, it won't free up resources. Mechanically interesting content, as demonstrated by the indie games of the last decade, is just a different form of handmade content. A designer hand made the procgen algorithms. Players ultimately bond with the designer(s), no matter what meta level they build the content at. In a hand-built game you might start to get a sense for where the designers hide treasure chests. In a procgen game you learn the algorithms themselves and how to predict and abuse them.

There's another form of game content, story content, which remains an edge for humans. Algorithms, or "AI" if you must, can't compete here. It would be the same as waiting for AI that can write award winning movie scripts.

The marriage of story content and mechanical content is a superior game-making formula to the procgen approach. So the _some point_ you refer to is probaby far away still.

[belugacat]

Jevon’s Paradox [0] suggests that it won’t; the freed up resources will just be used for other things.

Tooling for 3D modeling/texturing/rigging/etc is significantly more complex and powerful than it was 20 years ago, yet Pixar doesn’t need fewer artists for a movie today compared to Toy Story - in fact quite the opposite.

AI techniques useful to artists will get folded in the tooling and enable artists to make even more detailed/complex games & movies, but that doesn’t mean the AAA games of 2030 will require fewer artists.

However, talented small teams will likely be able to leverage them to create things that would have been inconceivable from a small team a decade ago.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[mediaman]

Tools to make art content have gotten dramatically better in the last 10 years. Systems such as Substance, which create algorithmic textures to replace manual texture creation in Photoshop, have resulted in at least a 10x increase in productivity.

Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.)

So, yes, we will see AI in content generation, but it isn't going to be in the form of replacing art bottlenecks. It will manifest in new tooling for artists, who will become more productive, and there will be even fewer artists who have good mastery of these tools, and the demand of quality will increase further. Which would lead to similar bottlenecks to today, though I believe artists will be paid better, and it will become even tougher to break in.

[HellDunkel]

It probably already is. Texture delighting is already on the horizon combined with infinite texture scaling this will be a great help for artists.

[ReactiveJelly]

So that demand can expand to fill all available space? Yes.

[Andrex]

I wonder if that's a little "be careful what you wish for"...