[HN Gopher] Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefi...
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Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter (2018)
Author : mooreds
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-04-11 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (allarsblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (allarsblog.com)
| 323454 wrote:
| Check out this amazing link from within the article:
| https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
| [deleted]
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I feel like without having worked on UE4 blueprints I'm not
| getting a whole lot of comedy here. Yes, sure, some of these
| are messy or elaborate, but _from hell_? For all I know, half
| of these could be best practice blueprints and I wouldn 't be
| able to tell the difference.
| rektide wrote:
| hiring sepme with systems sense is something I wish a lot more
| companies could & would perioidcally try, emergency or no.
| software devs are awash in their own experiences & there should
| be such a huge market for outside visitors to come re-assess,
| review, suggest or dabble in some re-orientation.
|
| this article is such an amqzing unspoken revelatory tale, that
| applies to so many kinds of software engineering environments.
| [deleted]
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Allowing reported issues to result in zero action is the
| quickest way to convert your employees, especially your
| engineers, from enthusiastic company-first workers into "clock
| in, clock out, it's not my problem" workers. Most employees,
| again especially engineers, want to improve the company and
| themselves... until you prove that their thoughts do not matter._
|
| The flip side of this, which I have also experienced, is that the
| entire company simply accepts the issue as "normal" and stops
| trying to deal with it. Generally this happens when people have
| tried many times to solve it and the team has lost a lot of time.
| People get annoyed when you bring it up because everyone is
| dealing with it all the time and if you _really_ brought it up
| every time you saw it, every sentence would reference it. In a
| healthy company this is the behavior you expect around "the
| problem" the company is working on: everyone efficiently and
| implicitly references the problem in their work. There's a thin
| line between nibbling around the edges of a problem and biting
| the same spot without effect.
| zubspace wrote:
| Very interesting read. Some things about the difference between
| middle/senior/lead-developers is a bit too generalized /
| controversial. But this quote stuck with me:
|
| "What you do not want are employees who are blindly following you
| down a potentially self-destructive path because they believe
| anything the company does is what it should do."
|
| What I find fascinating about the Unreal engine is, how fast they
| are able to iterate or implement new features, without that whole
| thing falling apart. Reading their release notes [1] is crazy. No
| idea, how the manage to keep going at that pace.
|
| [1] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/release-notes/
| [deleted]
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _By the Way, All Your Subordinates Are Lying to You (Because
| You Don 't Listen)_
|
| > _One very interesting thing I had found, when I came into an
| office as an outside objective evaluator and you had left me to
| do my job, was that approximately 2 nanoseconds later your
| employees were already telling me everything that was wrong about
| you, your company, and your development methodologies. It was not
| a matter of having a trusting face, or even promising them to
| make things better, it was about your employees who cared about
| the growth of the company, and more importantly about their own
| growth within a company despite feeling unheard and ignored. I
| just happened to be a new face that wouldn't judge them for what
| they would say, and even if I did, often they are so tired of the
| problem being present that they would even just stop caring about
| any potential consequences of speaking out against their
| employer._
|
| Whenever I read something like this I wonder if I've just been
| extremely lucky with my employers, because I see it so often it
| sometimes feels like it's the norm (despite _obviously_ not
| benefiting anyone). It should be noted that I don 't work in the
| games industry though
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| I have a close friend who's a director. I've always treated him
| like an equal but one day I told him that he was never getting
| the whole story. He felt devastated because he thought it was
| him but it's not him, it's just the title.
|
| Part of getting the fancy title is understanding that you will
| never get the truth from subordinates, you will get a sugar-
| coated version of the truth that is close enough to the truth,
| but not so close that you'd rage and fire someone on the spot.
| Even if you've never even do that in a million years,
| somewhere, somehow, someone who is giving you good and bad news
| will always sugarcoat the truth on the bad news yet hype up the
| good news.
| GrumpyYoungMan wrote:
| The old joke that " _Consultants tell you what you already knew
| but didn 't want to face._" has been around forever for a
| reason. It's even an accepted tactic by business units to hire
| a consultant to document all these known problems as a means to
| force themselves to clean up their own act.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I've encountered it a little bit, and in both cases I left as
| soon as I realized I wasn't going to make any more headway.
|
| But the key is here:
|
| > They immediately asked who was giving up this information and
| wanted to crack down on this perceived insubordination, rather
| than trying to address the issue
|
| One of the key elements of the "boss" social role is to enforce
| _subordination_ : people doing what you tell them to do. This
| is kind of intrinsic to the interpersonal dynamic, and it's
| quite hard to avoid doing at least some of the time even if
| you're aware of how it can be a problem.
|
| The problem with people doing what you tell them to do is that
| what you tell them to do may be wrong or incomplete. You then
| have two choices:
|
| - admit error. This is uncomfortable.
|
| - increase the effort to _subordinate_ the person so the boss
| does not lose face.
|
| There are all sorts of examples and case studies of this kind
| of thing in command situations. Here's it causing a plane
| crash: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/10/asiana-airlines-to-
| pursue-co...
| mch82 wrote:
| I have explicitly instructed my team to let me know if I ask
| them to do something stupid so we can avoid the mistake. I
| was so excited the first time someone spoke up to alert me
| that I was overlooking a better option & made sure to
| celebrate the alert in order to keep the transparency going.
|
| There may be teams where this direct approach wouldn't work
| out, but so far it's seemed to help.
| neatze wrote:
| To very large degree Boss/Management role is to support
| (indirect control) allocation of human capital resources to
| tasks in relation to objectives with minimal inefficiencies
| such as; conflicts, overlap in tasks, miscoordination.
|
| I would argue there is virtually no justification to manage
| people by means direct control, virtually for any team/group
| sizes.
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's the organizational role. The interpersonal, social
| one is often a lot more primitive and has nothing to do
| with capital or resources.
| thu2111 wrote:
| That seems extreme. Managers have to lead and make
| decisions. If they don't then you rapidly end up with
| chaos. That's how some firms end up with 10 different
| languages being used, where no engineer can work on anyone
| else's codebase because there's no consistency about
| anything, where progress is minimal because decisions don't
| get made due to some people disagreeing with each other and
| having no way to break the deadlock, etc.
|
| I think it's become sort of fashionable to claim bosses are
| always clueless or shouldn't actually try to manage because
| their employees are always smarter than they are. The
| "servant manager" idea. That is dead wrong in my
| experience. Or rather, if the manager has no idea how to do
| the work their employees are doing and just sits out that
| part of their role, the team has much bigger problems.
| neatze wrote:
| Concept of empowerment within a context of mission
| command and science of control, arguably, is by far the
| most complex matter in humans.
|
| > Managers have to lead and make decisions. If they don't
| then you rapidly end up with chaos. That's how ...
|
| I thought I made this point clear in terms of
| inefficiencies example.
|
| While it is oversimplification I attempt to exemplify
| this using spatial navigation analogy.
|
| Owners select area and resources.
|
| Managers of Managers who make decisions on approach to
| area and to a degree by what resources.
|
| Operational Manager make decision on routes way points a
| given resources.
|
| Workers will make decisions in between way points.
|
| With such example: one can argue this should be top down
| one way hierarchical approach, the old school inefficient
| approach. (eg. Direct Control)
|
| In my perspective, modern approach is to utilize indirect
| control by establishing conditional triggers (eg. only
| specifying limitations on areas, approaches, routes, and
| way points) based on horizontal feedback (top/down or
| down/up hierarchy) and vertical feedback (side way
| communication).
| coderintherye wrote:
| The boss role does not have to enforce subordination, there's
| multiple styles of management which encourage self-leadership
| in terms of what people work on and how they do it. I'm
| personally a fan of David Marquet's "Leader-Leader" style.
|
| But, because so many people expect to be subjugated in their
| roles it does require some hurdles to get past normal
| societal expectations and not everyone is a fit for it, some
| people just want a task list and to be told what to do. I
| think the world could be a better place if we could
| effectively help people sort into the companies with the
| leadership style that best suits their working style.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| > so many people expect to be subjugated
|
| Was thinking something along the same lines. I work in an
| environment where a tiny bit of self initiative does very
| well for one's work and career, and still some people can't
| get it over their heads. Unless something is very clearly
| stated somewhere, they won't do it no matter how obvious it
| is, even people who are trying to get a promotion. I swear
| sometimes I think people would let the office burn because
| "yelling fire!" is not of their stated position
| responsibilities.
| neatze wrote:
| This primarily can be attributed to how people perceive
| risk and risk aversion mechanisms, don't think this would
| be false to assume it also relates to responsibility.
|
| Self initiative people willing to take more risk and thus
| responsibility if things don't work out, where not self
| initiative people if things don't work out, take
| substantially less responsibility by default.
| jacquesm wrote:
| More often than not technical issues are in fact management
| issues. Plenty of evidence for that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's only natural though, one way to play the salary game is to
| maximize your perceived involvement and truck factor, while
| reducing actual efforts needed, all while avoiding getting
| upsetting colleagues.
|
| Workloads at full capacity, with stakes distributed precisely
| according to power structures, with zero meaningful/impactful
| output thus zero uncertainty, is Pareto optimal, if you view a
| corporate as a salary distribution game that you're a player
| of.
| istorical wrote:
| Since I don't often see UE4 related posts on the HN front page
| but love the technical community here, gonna go ahead and take
| the opportunity to ask what people in the industry think about
| current job opportunities for entry level folks transitioning
| from web development work.
|
| I know the old story about conditions being worse and avoiding
| turning your passion into your job/hell, but anyone able to chime
| in?
|
| I'm working on a VR game as a learning experience and using UE4
| with the hope that as AR/VR grows more popular over the next
| decade I'll have set myself up for moving to the field, but I
| don't know how early I might be able to make that move or how
| quickly opportunities are growing. A few years ago my hope was
| that by now VR would have grown to the point that some of the
| digital agencies here in NY would have work doing branded VR
| experiences or some type of VR work for non-gaming related VR
| uses / for non-technology companies. But I haven't necessarily
| seen VR roles popping up at agencies / marketing firms.
|
| Anyone with any insight on VR or UE4 job market general trends?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| I'm an indie developer, so limited perspective for sure.
| Focusing on games and the consumer market.
|
| The main issue I can see with VR is the same pattern that
| played out in mainstream PC gaming -- where 20% of the market
| takes the vast majority of the market's dollars. That means
| that the VR market can sustain far far less companies, even
| though games cost more and are primarily developed by indies.
|
| I'll bet Half-Life: Alyx and Beat Saber took in more than a
| third of all money spent on VR last year, whereas everyone else
| is left competing for scraps.
|
| If you make or find a game studio that is breaking into that
| upper category then you may be in a very comfortable position
| for the riding future growth.
| avereveard wrote:
| vr is going to be an inherently smaller market not just for
| the cost of entry but because it's inherently hard to make it
| casual
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| tbh, The Quest 2 selling like hotcakes as a portable Beat
| Saber machine makes me think otherwise. The same issues
| apply to regular consoles too.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| I think that for VR:
|
| buyFactor = price / howGoodTheTechIs
|
| If either the denominator increases or the numerator
| decreases it could more popular in the future.
| SeanBoocock wrote:
| Been in the industry for a decade and am a hiring manager for
| engineers. Overall, the industry has never been better and
| there are plenty of job opportunities available to work on a
| wide variety of games.
|
| In terms of general advice for junior engineers, I wouldn't get
| too caught up on technology (ie engine). The sorts of things I
| am looking for are: do you have strong computer science
| fundamentals? have you taken game related projects from
| conception to completion? how well do you work within inter-
| disciplinary teams? and do you evaluate your work from a user's
| (ie player's) perspective?
|
| Unreal dominates AAA for third party studios and I don't think
| that will change in the near future. Whether Unreal expands its
| dominance to mobile is an open question, but with more HD games
| going to mobile (or starting development with HD and mobile as
| platforms) I would probably bet on it. Unity probably isn't
| going anywhere in the near future but I don't expect it to
| shake Unreal's hold on large game production; they're simply
| too far behind.
|
| I am fairly pessimistic on VR as a whole, but there will likely
| still be a small market there for the foreseeable future. With
| Sony recommitting to VR for PS5 and Oculus continuing to pump
| some (albeit much smaller) money into the space, I expect VR to
| remain a stable niche. AR is a lot harder to predict as Apple
| is the big unknown. There are a lot of companies ready to jump
| on that opportunity (ie Niantic) if someone can figure out the
| right hardware.
| 1-6 wrote:
| "I know the old story about conditions being worse and avoiding
| turning your passion into your job/hell, but anyone able to
| chime in?"
|
| I think you already know the general culture of the work you
| want to get involved in. VR projects are usually side projects
| and considered nice to have rather than need to have. There
| haven't been "killer apps" recently which has driven massive
| adoption from industries with deep pockets such as
| infrastructure or transportation. As much as I respect media
| and entertainment, the pool of dollars are hotly contested. It
| better to work for other industries.
| Animats wrote:
| 2019 was the Year of VR.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I'm not convinced VR is set to grow a whole lot. I think that
| the VR that we were looking forward to back in the The Lawn
| Mower Man / Matrix days is a long way off. All we have today is
| just TVs that you glue to your eyes which aren't really close
| to what we've been fantasizing about in sci-fi for decades.
|
| * Most headsets probably aren't good enough to not cause
| headaches after about 2 hours. I also think they could lead to
| eye problems.
|
| * Right now we only have a very limited subset of senses
| available. (Touch, Taste and Smell are still a long ways away
| from being available.)
|
| * The way to interface with VR is still very crude. Still uses
| a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface.
| Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill
| like device to prevent you from bumping into walls.
|
| * The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to
| run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is
| expensive. The cost of developing those games is also crazy
| expensive.
| Asooka wrote:
| > Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect
| like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a
| expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping
| into walls.
|
| It is a shame how many games developers don't want to let
| people use the analogue stick to move in VR. It's
| uncomfortable for some people for a bit, but for the majority
| it's fine and lets you do all the normal in-game things. HL:
| Alyx is the most recent example where Valve originally didn't
| offer the option for simply walking and turning smoothly in
| VR. I get that you want your game to be accessible to the
| greatest number of people, but you're limiting your design
| space this way and leaving aside a part of the market.
| thrower123 wrote:
| GPU shortages have hit VR at a very unfortunate time. It was
| just starting to take off a little bit, but now you have to
| trade your first-born child to get a 3080 card to really
| drive VR.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Hasn't Facebook effectively killed PC VR anyway?
| (discontinuing the Rift S, forced FB logins, and focusing
| on closed-platform mobile VR)
| klipklop wrote:
| Surprising no not really. Facebook has greatly improved
| the oculus link functionality for the Quest. You can now
| play PC VR wirelessly with an application called Virtual
| Desktop.
|
| I beat half life Alyx this way and it was awesome. No
| link cable is my preferred way to play pc vr. They killed
| the rift S mostly because the Quest 2 is the better unit
| overall.
|
| I do suspect though they will eventually stop supporting
| pcvr, but today it works pretty well.
| throwaway34241 wrote:
| > Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect
| like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a
| expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping
| into walls.
|
| > The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to
| run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is
| expensive.
|
| The most popular VR device right now is the Oculus Quest 2,
| which is $299, needs no additional hardware, and uses fully
| motion tracked controllers (along with hand tracking).
| There's a boundary tracking system to prevent running into
| walls.
|
| Also, it is growing a lot on a year-over-year basis, although
| of course the base is still tiny compared to cell phones etc.
|
| So some of your info is out of date. I think that some of the
| challenges being worked on right now are content, device
| size/weight, and also integrating eye and face tracking into
| headsets. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-
| on-m...
| seoaeu wrote:
| $300 is not cheap for a lot of people. It is more than I've
| ever spent on a computer monitor, and I use those every
| day!
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| People drop $1000 on smartphones all the time. It might
| be expensive, but it's not unobtanium anymore.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > People drop $1000 on smartphones all the time.
|
| you live in a different universe
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| An iPhone 12 with bumped storage and sales tax is about
| $1000. Apple probably sells roughly 200 million phones a
| year that cost at least $800? I'm not sure how many
| premium smartphones Samsung sells these days.
|
| I'm not sure how you can consider that another universe?
| It's a pretty big market right here on planet Earth?
| throwaway34241 wrote:
| I don't think it's exactly expensive either, relative to
| other devices that have seen broad adoption. Computers,
| smart phones, TVs, (LCD/tube) monitors, tablets etc
| didn't reach that price point until they were in the
| market for quite a while.
|
| Sure it might need to be cheaper to be affordable to 100%
| of the world, but it's not even close to saturating the
| market in high income countries yet (or the market share
| of much more expensive devices).
|
| BTW the $300 device is not just a display, it includes a
| fairly high end smartphone chip in addition to a high
| res-screen, battery, lenses, controllers, 4 cameras etc.
| I wouldn't expect major cost reductions anytime soon.
| hackRn3975 wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't own a modern
| VR headset ?
|
| Although, you still could and have this opinion I'm just
| curious.
|
| Honestly even if you don't own one I'm not saying we should
| dismiss your opinion. Honestly it arguably means more or I
| should say could mean more.
|
| The thing that sticks out to me is, do you think these are
| good arguments for "games won't grow" or "Vr usage won't
| grow" ?
|
| I'm thinking about when video games first were gaining
| popularity since it's a really good comparison imo.
|
| ~ * tv/game eye problems ~ * limited controls ~ * very crude
| interfaces ~ * expensive hardware (thinking of original pc
| games to even the N64 $100+)
|
| So if we're not close to the ideal then it's not worth it ?
| "Matrix days is a long way off.", yeah it probably is... so ?
|
| If you want VR of today or even in 5 years to be the "Matrix"
| or the holy grail of VR then yes you will be dissapointed.
|
| All that to say this hypothesis you're proposing : "Vr won't
| grow a whole lot because we're far away from the Matrix vr
| experience" is not totally unreasonable but I personally
| think it's really weak and historically proven wrong in so
| many industries.
| Animats wrote:
| VR has fundamental usability problems. If you and the world
| move separately, people get disoriented. Most of the
| successes involve a virtual world locked to the physical
| world (Beat Saber) or where the player sits in a vehicle.
| Still, there are dancers using VRchat with full body
| tracking, the closest thing yet to full dive.
|
| AR, in some ways, has more potential. In AR, people can still
| see where they are. It's mostly a hardware cost problem. If
| you could get AR goggles down to swim goggle size and selling
| for $39.95, you could do Pokemon AR.
|
| I'm interested in big virtual worlds. Lately, that field has
| been invaded by the Make Money Fast / NFT / ICO crowd.
| They've been building crappy virtual worlds with overpriced
| virtual assets. I'm not sure how this ends.
|
| Second Life has found a new big success. They added an area
| of "premium homes" two years ago. If you sign up for a paid
| membership, which is about $100/year, you get a nice upper
| middle class American house in a nice neighborhood. The
| neighborhoods are well laid out, nicely landscaped, and have
| several distinct styles. You can decorate your house, invite
| people over, have parties, visit other people, walk or drive
| around, or just hang out in your house. They've built over
| 60,000 houses so far and are struggling to keep up with
| demand. The neighborhoods are all hand-built, not just
| stamped out from some template.
|
| These are planned unit developments in a virtual world. It's
| something people stuck in some crappy apartment want - the
| American Dream. [1]
|
| This isn't the only option - you can buy raw land outside the
| planned unit developments and build your own thing. But many
| people just want to buy a nice virtual lifestyle. Something
| nobody seems to have anticipated is that there's a market for
| rather boring virtual worlds.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/2peH7aeuwPI
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >Something nobody seems to have anticipated is that there's
| a market for rather boring virtual worlds.
|
| Philip K Dick predicted it: Accessorize your Perky Pat
| Layout!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_
| E...
|
| >The story begins in a future world where global
| temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world
| it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear
| during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve
| humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has
| initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets,
| where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the
| unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism
| involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert
| with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to
| simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier
| than either the grim existence of the colonists in their
| marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global
| warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is
| prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D
| allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky
| Pat" (the name of the main female character in the
| simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a
| pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around
| the layouts and the use of the drug.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Perky_Pat
|
| >In this novel, survivors of a global thermonuclear war
| live in isolated enclaves in California, surviving off what
| they can scrounge from the wastes and supplies delivered
| from Mars. The older generation spend their leisure time
| playing with the eponymous doll in an escapist role-playing
| game that recalls life before the apocalypse -- a way of
| life that is being quickly forgotten. At the story's
| climax, a couple from one isolated outpost of humanity
| plays a game against the dwellers of another outpost (who
| play the game with a doll similar to Perky Pat dubbed
| "Connie Companion") in deadly earnest. The survivors'
| shared enthusiasm for the Perky Pat doll and the creation
| of her accessories from vital supplies is a sort of mass
| delusion that prevents meaningful re-building of the
| shattered society. In stark contrast, the children of the
| survivors show absolutely no interest in the delusion and
| have begun adapting to their new life.
| void_mint wrote:
| (I am not a game dev but work at a games startup with a bunch
| of big industry people) To be successful at finding employment
| in games with UE4, you have to be able to use create game
| systems without using their blueprint feature. It's insanely
| powerful, and people really like it for rapid prototyping, but
| relatively frequently blueprint devs can't transition to
| C++/"raw" game code. The same is true for pretty much any game
| engine - the ability to make games beats the ability to use
| editor features.
|
| If you're looking for entry level work, I would say having a
| wealth of items in your portfolio is helpful (across several
| genres/styles, meaning get some work out there that isn't VR/AR
| related). Also remember that paying gamedev work is usually
| nothing like making games for yourself. Think hard about what
| and why you enjoy making games. Are you comfortable working on
| something like a desktop version of Candy Crush? Or a poker
| game? In my experience (on the internet) you hear most about
| A.) AAA Crunch, and B.) Massively successful or massively
| failed games. The middle is where most employment happens.
| Mediocre games making modest sums of money.
|
| If I was interested in working with UE4 for games I would kinda
| just tailor my resume to working at Riot. Valorant is written
| in UE and they're a huge name/very established business, so
| you'll be shielded from some/most of the garbage of the games
| industry.
|
| The job market is good. Lots of AAA studios are moving away
| from custom engines into UE/Unity because of the advancements
| in the engines making them more hireable/popular.
|
| Just my 2 cents, and I'm certain others have wildly different
| experiences.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| >> To be successful at finding employment in games with UE4,
| you have to be able to use create game systems without using
| their blueprint feature. It's insanely powerful, and people
| really like it for rapid prototyping, but relatively
| frequently blueprint devs can't transition to C++/"raw" game
| code.
|
| You make it sound as if you would inevitably hit a brick wall
| when using blueprint. This is not true. Game design is
| different to programming and some coding skills are almost a
| requirement for blueprints. Lots of game logic is better
| implemented as blueprint than c++.
| klodolph wrote:
| Visual coding is still in its infancy. We have decades of
| experience for how to design systems with textual code, and
| a ton of tools (IDEs, static analyzers, refactoring tools)
| that work with text.
|
| The fact that some systems are better implemented as text
| is not an indictment of visual coding as much as it is a
| testament to the maturity of text as a language for coding.
|
| Game design is only on part of the problem anyway--often a
| feature which is simple from a design standpoint is
| complicated to implement in code. This is why you don't
| just hire game designers who dabble in coding, but also
| programmers.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Visual coding is still in its infancy. We have decades
| of experience for how to design systems with textual
| code, and a ton of tools (IDEs, static analyzers,
| refactoring tools) that work with text.
|
| Visual coding has been around since at least the 1970s;
| we have decades of experience with it, too.
| klodolph wrote:
| And yet, in that time period, it has remained in its
| infancy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Or, extensive experience has shown that it is best used
| as an adjunct to textual programming.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Exactly- you hire both and for good reason. The point is
| that there is absolutly no reason for somebody not to be
| successful in game design working with blueprint.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Ideally C++ programmers should know how to make blueprint
| components wrapping their C++ code, and understand
| blueprint programming enough to know how to make usable
| blueprint apis.
| void_mint wrote:
| > You make it sound as if you would inevitably hit a brick
| wall when using blueprint. This is not true.
|
| In my experience, devs that spent all their time with
| blueprints did not transition well away from blueprints.
| YMMV.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Maybe they should not transition away from blueprint.
|
| I get that beeing aware of pitfalls and manage teams to
| do things ,,the right way" can be very tricky.
| void_mint wrote:
| I'm not really interested in arguing with you. There are
| times when Blueprints are insufficient, and if a team is
| comprised exclusively of Blueprint devs, that team will
| be unsuccessful. This post was about UE employability, to
| which I added my input that being versatile is important,
| which from an employability standpoint is pretty
| objectively true.
|
| Blue prints are great! People should use them where
| appropriate, and use something else when not.
| SeanBoocock wrote:
| If your only, or primary, experience building games was
| scripting systems in blueprints (or analogous visual
| scripting language), you wouldn't get hired as an engineer
| at most large studios. There is a role for that on those
| teams: technical designer. The (gameplay) engineer exists
| to build large systems that might have hooks that allow
| designers to script/customize the functionality through a
| visual scripting system. Engineers provide their value
| lower in the stack.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| The only companies making serious money in gaming are:
|
| Epic, Apple, Google, Steam, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft.
|
| National Governments who charge 10-20% sales taxes on customer
| spending.
|
| Game/app development would be ok if not for the huge taxes that
| Platform Owners and Governments charge.
|
| You're typically left with about 50% of what customers actually
| spent on your app.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Dont shift your professional life towards vr or ar. You will be
| disappointed. I see lots of opportunities popping up with UE4
| at the moment. If you enjoy that and have web design or coding
| skills go ahead. You probably dont want to dive straight into
| character animation but there are lots of other interesting
| fields around UE4.
| ku-man wrote:
| "Game engineer"
|
| Well, guess we can add that new "engineering discipline" to the
| other new ones such as dev-ops engineer, gis engineer, growth
| engineer, UI engineer, Azure data engineer, customer engineer,
| cloud engineer.
|
| No wonder the real engineers (e.g. structural, mechanical) are
| pissed.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Brings back nightmares of my own working in the Los Angeles area
| games biz.
| wbc wrote:
| care to share any warstories?
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16775166 - April 2018 (115
| comments)
| Yoofie wrote:
| Very interesting article. Some of these are shocking:
|
| > Use Source Control: Do you not use source control?
|
| How do professional companies not use source control in the year
| 2021? The mind boggles.
|
| > Smaller Commits, Better Commit Logging: Submitting a 2GB
| 2000-file change to Perforce with the description "did some work"
| is terrible
|
| Also quite surprising. If you are going to log your progress, you
| might aswell properly document what actually changed.
|
| > Don't Ignore Your Lead Engineer if You Have One: If your lead
| engineer says that you need to spend $2,000 on SSDs or buy X
| license for Y, and your answer is immediately no because you
| believe your engineer is just trying to waste your budget, you
| either need to learn how to trust your engineer or find a new
| engineer. I have seen a company waste 70 man-hours a week simply
| because they had their workers on slow hard drives. Giving
| everyone faster SSDs would have cost the company ~60 man-hours in
| budget.
|
| This one really hits home and something that I personally had to
| deal with. I had to complain and fight for a long time to get the
| company to actually buy a SSD (or another job critical piece of
| time-saving hardware). Usually its not management saying no to
| such requests, its more of a strong general attitude of saving
| money and keeping expenses low. I have quickly learned that this
| level of penny pinching is a red flag and you should bail out as
| fast as you can because it rarely gets better and that attitude
| is rarely limited to one department.
|
| Also related: Sometimes its about money but in a very indirect
| way. The amount of time I had to waste waiting for slow builds to
| complete because the corporate Anti-virus scans every new
| generated file is staggering. What should be a 10 minute build
| was over 1 hour, all due to the mandated new corporate anti-
| virus. Corporate IT could not adjust the security policy because
| they are understaffed because management laid off 80% of the IT
| team causing a huge backlog of work which then cascades to every
| other part of the business. Then they wonder why they get
| negative feedback during workplace reviews.
|
| ---
|
| A thing I quite liked: the hierarchy ranking of engineers and
| distinction between senior and lead engineer.
|
| --- Also, does anyone know of places where I can read similar war
| stories? These articles are always super interesting to read and
| learn from.
| Kiro wrote:
| Source control for UE games is a different beast. Should still
| be done of course but a lot more tricky, so I understand why
| people don't.
| SeanBoocock wrote:
| Not sure where this is coming from. Most AAA studios have
| been using Perforce for decades. There is a smaller
| contingent using Git, mostly mobile and indie games. UE is
| not different in that respect. We have to deal with large,
| versioned binary assets in game development, something that
| Git struggles with (without things like LFS that are hacking
| around the architectural problem).
|
| I don't know what to say about a studio not using source
| control in 2021. I see student projects regularly with full
| version control and CI.
| afrodc_ wrote:
| What makes it complicated? I don't do games development so
| I've no idea how the project structure looks.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear the answer as well!
|
| I am neither an Unreal nor games developer, but in case
| nobody provides a better answer...
|
| From what I've heard, what makes source control tricky for
| game development is all of the non-text files.
|
| Git's distributed "everybody has a local copy of the entire
| repo" approach is not well suited for binary assets,
| especially large and frequently changing ones. Nearly any
| "modern" game development project will have gigabytes if
| not terabytes of these. Imagine you're a game coder and
| every `get fetch` grabs another 400GB of textures from the
| level designers.
|
| Last I heard many game dev shops still used Subversion
| instead of git for precisely this reason.
|
| There are also workarounds/extensions for git; not sure of
| their maturity/adoption.
| illvm wrote:
| Why not just split the assets and the code, have the code
| reference a version of the assets, which are on a
| separate server and only fetched when needed?
| thu2111 wrote:
| That's the same thing as not using version control, given
| that the point of using UE4 is that you don't have to
| write much code. Note the repeated references to
| "blueprint spaghetti". Blueprint is a visual DSL for game
| designers. The assets end up encoding much of the game
| logic.
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's basically what git-annex is, but I guarantee that
| companies with this problem will be doing something
| disastrously incoherent with file shares and
| document_final_2 names instead.
| khalladay wrote:
| I've been in games for about 9 years. In my experience,
| virtually everyone uses Perforce. Studios that use
| Subversion seem to be the outlier.
|
| You're dead on with the rest though. I'll add that UE4 is
| a large, hulking behemoth that generates a metric crap
| ton of intermediate files during builds and general
| development, which makes managing what to check in a bit
| of bear. Additionally, a lot of teams try to avoid having
| artists need to re-compile their editor when they pull
| changes from P4, so some amount of compiled binaries get
| checked in as well (usually from an automated build
| system like Jenkins or Team City that runs after every
| source file commit).
|
| There are also some parts of the engine that need to
| exist in order for other parts to run properly, but that
| don't get compiled when you're making changes to the
| engine itself (like helper programs, or platform specific
| DLLs, which you need to specifically compile when you
| want them). Sometimes, these binaries are checked into p4
| for one reason or another, which leads to fun things like
| needing to remember that if you're checking in the DotNet
| binaries folder, to explicitly NOT check in a couple iOS
| related DLLs, since the engine's build tool will try to
| recompile them every time you build a game for any
| platform, and will fail if those files aren't writeable.
| The engine is so massive at this point that there several
| other things like this that need to be kept in mind when
| setting up version control on a project.
|
| [edit: I originally said there were "at least 20" things
| like this and realized I couldn't think of that many, so
| I've revised]
|
| The engine is very capable (there's a reason that AAA
| studios without an in-house engine default to it), but
| it's also got 20 years of legacy systems in it and a lot
| of pain points to deal with for projects of any real
| size.
| learc83 wrote:
| In addition to large binary asset files, in Unity you have
| tons of yaml files that you don't edit by hand. If you make
| a small change to a scene with the editor, it can change
| dozens of lines in the corresponding yaml file.
|
| Now imagine 2 people working on the same scene. When you
| attempt to merge, you have to read and understand an auto
| generated file that was never intended for human
| consumption.
|
| To a lesser degree, it's analogous to using line based
| source control on a jpeg to handle merging edits made in
| photoshop.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Sounds like the yaml shouldn't be in source control. I've
| always followed the guideline: If it's generated by the
| computer from some other thing, then put the other thing
| in source control.
| thu2111 wrote:
| It's not generated from another thing. It's the editor's
| save format, so it's the direct output of human work.
| It's just not in a 'genuinely' mergeable format.
|
| The fact is, that we take VCS for granted as programmers,
| but the vast majority of people don't have access to
| workflows that allow for true multi-user collaboration or
| branching/merging. Google Docs was a revolution because
| even though real-time joint editing is not that great and
| no substitute for the "work independent, review, merge"
| workflow developers use, it's still better than emailing
| Word docs to each other. Which is BTW still extremely
| common even in firms where they have Office 365 - most
| people never learned about the sharing and collab editing
| features.
|
| On a game most people aren't devs. So VCS is less
| relevant to them, and git especially so, for the reasons
| someone else discusses below. Note the mention of
| Perforce in the article. Why are they using expensive
| proprietary VCS? Well, Perforce is better at handling
| fully centralised workflows with large binary assets.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gregmac wrote:
| So.. how is source control done then? Centralized/lock-
| based (subversion)? Everyone works off the same shared
| NFS drive? Manually copy "changed" files from multiple
| people over top of each other and hope for the best?
| cartoonfoxes wrote:
| Centralized/lock-optional, and very large repositories.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Engineers used to talk war stories on the internet _all the
| time_. I think the switch from pseudo anon to real name social
| media has put a dent in that, but there are people still doing
| it on Twitter e.g @foone or @swiftonsecurity .. among a lot of
| other output.
|
| The trick now is limiting yourself to those war stories you'd
| be happy to have all your future job interviewers read :/
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