I would love to hear more about the story of how Troika got a source engine license and all the drama that led to vampire having to be released on the same day as HL2. I feel like most of the events surrounding that were not intentional on Troika's part, and getting the pre release version of source seems like a very interesting story!

I can't believe how great these videos are. There are no animations, stock videos, sound effects or cuts, just a person talking for +10 minutes straight, and he manages to fully control my attention throughout. Thank you for sharing.

Man I'm so glad youtube started recommending me Tim's videos.

Binged watched your videos is more fund than watching game reviews

Im writing my own (simple) game from scratch in C in my spare time. The motivation for me to not use an engine is that I want to learn how things work by doing them, and I feel that to truly innovate you need to have the technical understanding to know what you even can do

I've been doing game programming as a hobby in my spare time for the past 20 years. During this time, I've rewritten my game engine and codebase at least 10 times. While this endeavor hasn't directly generated revenue, it has significantly improved my programming skills and provided me with a deep understanding of various aspects related to computer graphics, programming, operating systems, and desktop managers. Indirectly, this experience has greatly benefited my career as a software developer, as problem-solving skills in software programming are universally valuable. In my humble opinion, pursuing this hobby is entirely worthwhile, even if you never intend to commercialize a game, provided you have a passion for programming.

This is what I like about using a managed environment/framework with a set of libraries (using MonoGame, formerly XNA): It gives me the satisfaction of coding my extended framework/engine (at a high level) while also having most of what I need to make a game like input, audio, sprite batching, game loop, math functions; and without having to interface with the hardware to get those things. So that could split the difference for those with one foot on both sides.

Godot is pretty great, and you can write with C# as well. I find it more pleasurable to use than Unity with similar results. I find the thought of writing my own engine daunting even though in the past I've tried Direct X and Win32 programming, I have a huge amount of respect for those that have done so as well as the shoulders of the giants we all stand on today.

I worked in construction in the UK for a couple of years and I found that a massive construction company involved in HS2, uses Unreal engine to compile all the CAD models before converting them to Revit models.

In one of your previous videos, you mentioned how you always have plenty of ideas for new games. I'd love to hear how you decide which ones to turn into actual games, and which ones not to.

Can you please do more videos on programming?

Theres a spectrum between rolling your own and unity/unreal. Libraries with different amounts of includes wheels. SDL for example. It handles the os, input, display etc, and leaves you to writing the game.

Thank you so much for this! Came from your GDC talk about Fallout Postmortem, and was really inspired about how you made a new game engine for it within a couple years, especially with how limited technology and resources are. I had to look you up specifically to see if you talked more about that engine, and you do not disappoint! I was learning Unity before the incident. Amd while I will never build a game using it, there's still a few skills I want to grab from it. (Basically, the ability to watch a tutorial, and make the same thing while writing my own clean code) After the incident, I started working on my own game engine. I'm mostly a hobbiest, and it's definitely one I want to use for decades. Though I have Godot as a failsafe, so if I inevitably want to make a game more than I want to make an engine, I can switch to Godot for a bit. In the meantime I'm learning so much from this attempt! Things I probably should have known, like git, how shaders work, etc, but didn't. If people could make an engine from scratch in just a couple years with that level of technology, I think I deffinately can with the frameworks, libraries, and api that I have available, plus ai like Phind to help me figure things out far quicker. Anywho, you have renewed a bit of that inspiration in me today. Hopefully I'll even be able to make my dream game someday!!!

Holy crap you worked on some HUGE games. Super impressed, I wanna make games for a living and am starting on my first commercial project as an indie dev. I'm hoping everything goes well but I'm glad I found you, such a fountain of experience. That's wonderful, got my sub

Even though I don't make games, hearing about this stuff is really interesting. Thanks again for the great videos. Even though I know you were not the "main guy" on them, I'd love to hear your experience on working on South Park and (especially) Pillars and Tyranny. Especially given the whole kickstarter craze that was going on with Pillars.

Thanks for this video, Tim. You articulate it so well. I'm going to just share this video to explain the topic instead of my own feeble attempts from now on. lol

I had always wanted to make my own game engine, and back around 2018 I really got started on doing it. In part I wanted to make a game for these low end single board computers, which didn't have good GPU drivers, or in some cases no OpenGLES compliant GPU at all. In the end what I realized and got great satisfaction from was making my own 3D rasterization engine for low end ARM hardware. I learned a ton, and while I didn't go all the way yet, I think it greatly help my understanding of how graphics work.

there are a lot of nice libraries that can make rolling your own engine a lot more manageable, but then you're in a grey area where imports like SDL and FMod and so on start making it look like you're using a pre-existing engine anyway. i think Godot is a step up from that, then Unreal. i've seen some 2d and retro styled 3d games come out from tiny indie studios running on their own engine and finding success but even in those cases its hard to say the time spent was worth it. there's a game called Barony which did the old id software routine and open sourced the engine a year after release, and having a compact open source code base means the game can live forever if that's what fans want.

I'd point out that it isn't a choice between building literally everything from scratch or using an off the shelf engine, there are libraries like SDL2 (or something like Pygame for more abstracted level interactions) that cover a lot of the different operating systems so you don't have to think about it as much. These exist somewhere roughly around the middle of those two extremes.

I am a programmer, I've never worked on a game save for a couple of failed tries. For myself it's mostly an academical exercise to write your own engine. You learn the graphics rendering pipeline, up until the HW level, how physics rules, lighting, gravity, collusion works are implemented. I find it similar to the exercises in my CS class where we designed our own ALU (CPU). It is weak, it is unoptimized but you learn how it works. That's why even if you won't going to use it for your 'production' code, it's enlightening to give it a go. Also reference to Tim's challenge yourself video! Thanks Tim!

5:13 is, to me, the ultimate benefit of owning your own source code. As you spend more time in a codebase you start to unlock some kind of god mode where you can instantaneously tell where a piece of code exists, and can do pretty much anything. The down side of this is to burn yourself out of the codebase, or have it reach a point where it's unmaintainable for others (or yourself when you come back weeks later after spending time somewhere else), so it's important to proactively and routinely clean up and refactor all the pain points in the codebase. Thankfully, the time you've spent in the codebase allows this process to go much more smoother and much more efficiently, so it's like a win-win.

It's good to mention that most popular engines have a nice API for extending the editor, which is often unnoticed or undervalued. For programmers, I highly recommend spending some time to get better at implementing custom editors, handles, asset management, etc. You can remake the most important parts of your game (and create tools for that) inside third-party engine, and leave less important modules as is.

Thank you for your insights, good sir. Very helpful !

So I wanna say that I absolutely love this video and how you layed out the pros and cons. I have many years working in Unity and one or two in Unreal. I've been building my own engine within the past 3 months now and I can agree in knowing how much time it would take to construct one. It would be amazing if you were able to take me under your wing becuase I am always looking to learn in what I have a passion for and you seem like an amazing developer/mentor!

I had no idea Mr. Cain worked on Wildstar. As for the video in general; I think this video has so much great reasoning as to why you would make your own engine. The more popular engines are not very modular. Thankfully, there are many options that were designed with that in mind. Some of them are more like frameworks or the like. I know Raylib is a pretty lean option, which I'm curious about looking into.

In my opinion it's often about vertical integration. I'm amazed at what Apple can do since they have total vertical control: if a Safari developer wants to change something in the kernel in order to improve performance, they can do it. People often treat abstractions or libraries as if there is no downside to using them, but I think there is an actual hierarchy to reality that means you end up distancing yourself from the root of the problem the more foreign abstractions you rely on. This is similar to what happened to the OOP design patterns nightmare. Ultimately people forget that there is a physical machine that exists and that it is the actual thing that will run your game.

My first non-academic job was at an AI company. They had built an infrastructure for representing knowledge that was really impressive - but nobody outside of that company used it. It’s very similar to what you mentioned about new hires wanting to use a standard engine. There just wasn’t an incentive for someone to become an expert in the in-house product if they knew that in 2-3 years they’d go work somewhere that used the industry standards. That said, it did exactly what we wanted. No artifacts from using a very general standard or platform. When it worked, it worked tremendously well.

You should do a collab with Pirate Software. I feel like you and Thor have vast amounts of knowledge and experience that should be shared with the community.

Love you videos, Tim. Thank you for being an authentic human. Honestly would love to hear your thoughts on an open source MIT licensed game engine like Godot. It would be amazing to have you contribute to that project. I believe it has the potential to be like Blender - open tech that anyone can use without getting locked into an ecosystem. And without falling into the trap of building it all. Would you consider assessing and reviewing Godot?

OMG good input. Im retired and thinking about making my own game. Right now, cause it's 2d, it's Unity in the running, but I really want to just make my own engine.

i loved this topic, please more!

To me the biggest advantage of roll-your-own-engine is having a clear idea about graphics bottlenecks. When shader recompilation happens, what is culled, etc.

Thanks for this wisdom. I had not considered the cons as much for making your own engine. Using engines is good for urgency. Maybe a good balance balance is to roll your own tools that work well with some popular engine, trying to put your own "front" or adaptations on engines, so that your own specializations shine while getting the benefits of getting games done fast.

Tim, great video! Since new Sim Settlements mod for Fallout 4 came out yesterday, it make me thinking on game engines and moding community. It seems that large part of Bethesda success comes from a huge moding community that their games have and it allows them to keep selling Skyrim for 9th time. It also seems that such moding friendliness was part of their game engine for awhile. Do you think that the aspect of moding friendliness should be a part of decision making as on what game engine to choose. Were you ever thinking about moders to your games in a future when you were creating them?

Always very interesting 👌

Funnily enough I was thinking about the choice of engine for The Outer Worlds after finishing my supernova playthrough the other day. So happy when I saw this pop up lol

FWIW having worked on a bunch of games, including some AAA ones, with both custom and off-the-shelf engines i'd rather be working with custom engines even if the i'm not the one who made them. I find it much more interesting this way (even with existing custom engines i like reading the code to see how different programmers handled similar issues) - and the control pro you mentioned is GARGANTUALLY GINORMOUS :-P. Also in my experience with Unreal, both the official support and most resources available out there are kinda useless in practice (with some exceptions of course) and the best approach is to just read the code (which is why incidentally so far i have avoided any Unity project). My experience might have been different if i worked at a big studio using Unreal though, the game i worked on was a AA at best. Though from a Linux gamer's perspective games made using Unity and Unreal tend to play pretty much perfectly under Wine so at least there is that.

the snail has left the bucket! . Did you have a chance to look at that Blue Dot short movie, metahuman animator showcase from Unreal engine?

im currently in this exact conundrum. theres a lot of unique things i want to do that current engines dont, and im quickly discovering im OCD when it comes to efficiency, and paranoid when it comes to legal nonsense like how much of my own game i actually own. as someone whos been exposed to programming for a long time but only recently actually learning, everything i see just flat out says "give up on making your own engine", and i hate that. i know its not gonna be easy, but giving an absolute like that can stifle the more creative ideas new programmers and designers might have. ive got no illusions about my first couple games- if i had learned programming a decade ago, maybe things would be different, but i cant afford to spend the time on it now. but, eventually, i do 100% absolutely plan to make my own engine, and do the things i want to do that would be impractical in existing ones. thats why, for now, im making parceled pieces of functionality that i can roll into either Unity or Unreal. i was leaning towards Unity before, but as I learn more C++, im recognizing certain flaws and shortcomings that make me tempted by Unreal and might switch over before serious development gets off the ground.

Great Video Tim. Would love to see you chat to Johnathan Blow about his Jai language. That madman makes an engine for every game, and now an entire programming language. I idolize that sort of bespoke development, but i wouldn't trade it for my high productivity in Unity.

Some of your colleagues at Obsidian must have interesting stories about working with the Creation Engine while developing New Vegas.

There is one other thing, a con for the industry as a whole. With more and more games being made in one of two engines there are fewer roles for those specialists that build engines, so there will over time be fewer and fewer people who already have the skills to build an engine from scratch working.

I can't tell if the audio desync is in the video or just my computer being weird. Still, fun to hear about these options.

'roll my own' Cain confirms blazes it 420

hey Tim, have you heard about or played The Outer Wilds? :D I think it came out very closely to Outer Worlds which was very unfortunate for them to have similar name and both being space-ish games. But it's an amazing indie game :)

Hope you're excited for BG3 Tim. :D

Hi Tim, anything to say about the state of game engines after Unity just modified terms of service?

I need to understand how stuff works so I have always coded my own engines, my latest one is great but huge for a single indie dev... I will finish it someday, for sure.

Thanks for the info!

Having written a game engine from scratch, I'm sitting here thinking there are a bunch of disadvantages to building your own. - Much higher degree of expertise required (people who can use existing capabilities in game engines may not be able to build such from scratch). - Need experts in multiple platforms, OSs, rendering systems, audio playback, network stacks, etc. - Possibly need cross platform support with consoles. - May be lower quality in some areas than commercial engine - Will need direct access to more / broader range of hardware for dev & test - Much, much more time - Higher risk Tim: "But, there is a huge con to making your own engine." "con" - singular??? Then procedes to go through a lau dry list of cons.... lol

Would you ever consider doing a Q&A with your audience? I've got a bunch of questions for you, I'm sure I'm not the only one.

'The die is cast'; also, 'the hourse is out of the barn', 'has left the barn' etc.

Which engine are you going to use when you do the Arcanum remake i hope to see?

Do you think that because Outer Worlds was in Unreal it was easier to avoid bugs, or was the amount of bugs that popped up pretty much normal, but the QA was better?

What of open source alternatives like godot?

Hey, Tim! Random question that may have already been answered, but how did you end up using your face for the low res desktop icon from Fallout?

Tim, I think you missed a good Option No. 3 that is available nowadays: free and open source game engines. If you take the time to look for one that is more in line with your needs, you can have most of the pros of the ready-made commercial engines while also reducing the cons somewhat (but not altogether, of course). And because it's free and open source, you also have many of the pros of the "make your own." You can, indeed, fork it and rewrite to your heart's content until it is, effectively, your own (though you don't need to) with no worries of EPIC or Unity taking a cut of your profits. And regarding things like knowing GPU pipelines, pixel shaders, memory allocation, CPU utilization, etc.... another benefit of this day and age is that there are plenty of free and open source (and cross-platform) utilities, libraries, SDKs, etc. that can handle a lot of that as well that can be utilized. For most things, there is no need to "re-invent the wheel" when creating your own game engine now. All the while, if something still isn't quite how you want it and you know how to achieve that, you are free to hop into the source code and change it. Simply put, it is a far better environment that it once was for endeavors like that, and I wish far more developers would do so. I dislike how one and/or two engines are saturating the market so thoroughly. It is monopolizing gaming technology.

Great perspective. I do my own engines, and I suppose I am in that rare and privileged position. I just found it too cumbersome to go through other peoples' bad abstractions and to wait on support to fix bugs, deal with updates that break your game, and so on. LOL I think I would rather work in a higher paying but boring part of the software industry for a while, save the money, and then retire into the freedom to make my own games with my own engines than suffer through a game industry that mostly uses third party engines. But I actually don't find it to be *too* bad. You can reuse a good deal of your Windows/Mac OS / other platform code from game to game. Other common problems in rendering and audio get solved more or less once, and you can reuse that stuff too. So it's not like you don't have an engine. You do. It's just that you don't start with it. You have to build it before you can reuse it on the next project.

What are your thoughts on the recent events with Unity? and what are your thoughts on something like Godot as a game engine?

Back when I was learning programming, the course I was in hammered into us to *never* use anyone else's code if we could not explain it line by line. While in a different industry now, it is still hard to break that mindset. That I would need to read and understand, say, UE5's entire codebase, before I even think about using it. All scripts and samples of things I have made (for fun, not profit), I've released out there for people to use and tear apart.

When you hear the stories of development studios making their engine along side a game project, it always sounds like such a nightmare.

I'm using GameMaker because while I would LOVE to write my own engine, my focus is making a game, and I don't want to have to deal with compiling, I/O, etc., for different hardware.

I have always found Unreal to be the easier engine to learn, however, I am an artist, and not really a programmer, so UE just always made sense to me, and the fact that I was able to teach myself Blueprint, and that for someone with my particular brain, being able to see how the logic works in a visual scripting system vs staring at lines of code, I will likely always hold that position unless something new comes along that ticks all those same boxes. Not to mention, Unity's business practices lately leave a lot to be desired. Epic isn't perfect, but by and large they have done right by their users, and continue to develop at a pace I am not sure anyone else can really compete against.

I love your videos so much, you certainly have Charisma 10 :) 13:11 And the phrase that comes to my mind is "the cat is out of the bag." I wonder if it's this one.

Goldsrc for hl1, source for the hlsource remake

13:30 With recent developments, I'd be very interested to see if your opinion has changed on this. Yes, Unity walked back the changes they proposed, but some developers don't trust them anymore. Do you think that's temporary or are we about to see devs switch to Godot or something similar?

That dog has sailed.

I think there is still a use case for making your own "engine", or using more minimal engines/frameworks, and that is: Low end, high performance abstract graphics games. if you are mostly a programmer that want to get a game done quick, and you can script your own graphics with drawing basics shapes, drawing pixels on screen or directly drawing to shaders, then something like Unity is way overkill and clunky.

I know you mentioned that you're semi retired but I was wondering if you're working on anything for yourself, game development-wise? Have you given any consideration to going indie? Some of my favorite games of the last decade were made by either one person, or just a handful.

I'm writing my own, it's hard but using an off the shelf engine is too limiting. What I am working on would not be possible otherwise.

You should use V12 engine with overhead cams and at least twin carburettors. Might be super charged too, for good measure.

I heard you had major engine trouble when working on Vampire. Could you talk about that story?

In unreal you have access and can modify engine source code?

What are your thoughts now post-unity runtime scandal? That one scared me off pretty bad. I have less issue paying a sub up front for an engine now than trusting these "FREE" engines. For one game I'm having it built from the ground up too now. It might be more expensive in the long run, but it seems safer.

"Hi ... everyone ... it's me ... Tim" 😊

I'm not asking for myself but just curious, if you wanted to sell the Arcanum engine, could you?

All I heard was "I own the Arcanum source code." I remember you've said before that you've compiled it and it works on modern systems. Does that mean you could make a drop-in replacement engine that would work with retail copies of the game? As it is, it does work, but requires downloading some mods.

How did the Enclave Come to be?

The pattern is all too familiar 😞 As usual, industry consolidation makes for wonderfully lowered barriers to entry (thanks to economies of scale) but also makes for awful breakdowns in communication (thank to diseconomies of scale).

Just a note, unity recently moved away from the revenue share model and they now charge a subscription depending upon your income. You need the subscription to port to console, but just making the game can be free.

"The horse has bolted (out the gate)" 😅

I guess a middle of the road solution is to use an open source game engine like Godot. But they're not as expansive of course.

I could be wrong in my assumption, but I think you forgot a third option like Amazon Lumber engine that can be changed dramatically dramatically like cloud imperium did with it when they used it to make their own Star Engine.unless I'm wrong in the terminology here...?

9:25 Hey now! Nginx is awesome. ;)

Good advice. People make things so much harder than they need to. 2 types of people want to change the world and reinvent the wheel: the young and the delusional. Or maybe you’re very rich. But if you’re not young any longer the clarity of being a realist is the burden you bear.

Have you ever looked into the Godot engine?

Unrelated, but do you have any thoughts on the recent controversy surrounding D&D 6e with the removal of race-related traits?

I love the Source engine.

In a perfect world there would be completely free and open-source game engine

I wouldn't see it as a disadvantage if someone has on their CV that they made and worked with their own engine for years, instead of the industry standard. It means they have gained a lot of experience on actually programming something from scratch and understanding the underlying algorithms, it wouldn't be hard for that person to transition to popular game engines if it works so well out of the box.

The only "game engine" I want is one that fits in my Highwayman!

Haha, as soon as you said "in a perfect world" your answer was obvious.

Every engine look a little different graphicly due to being made different. I fear if too many companies go over to these big engines that they loose that uniqueness. Idk maybe that is a silly thing to worry about.

you never got around to comparing unity vs unreal, what are the pros and cons of picking one over the other to us plebians who are no where near the level of considering making our own engine?

0:37 Godot as well. It's on track to beat Unity.

Making a game engine is a great learning experience but if you are serious about making a game then roll with Unity or Unreal.

Holy shit, you are hardcore.

If this was back in early 2000s and you were about to make "arcanum" type of game again, but let's say the over the shelf engines exited for a while, e.g. unreal and unity, would you still go with making your own or deciding to go with unreal/unity?

i ige2 developer. i say is very hard work to programm game engine for civil users. like Unity or Unreal

Back in my day Game Engines were made out of Car Engines... I'll see myself out. But in all seriousness this was a good lil video. Been enjoying The Outer Worlds, good stuff Tim.