We can go back to the basics, focus on not graphical realism, and/or, invent new rendering paradigms that lead to new art styles, and compute with less overhead, have modest system requirements.
It isn’t impossible.
Look at MGS5, Titanfall 2.
Shit looks pretty good, its a decade old, from before all this modern graphical absurdity.
There has literally never been a better time to become an indie dev, make a small team.
No publisher, no marketing.
Just don’t overpromise, and don’t take people’s money untill you actually have a minimum viable product.
Godot is completely open source, and completely free, and quite capable as an engine.
No one is coming to save us, but ourselves, if we choose to.
Unreal 5 alone is responsible for a lot of A-AA games looking like utter shit, both standing still (dithering every-fucking-where) and in motion (enough ghosting to fill a cemetery)
I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard anyone say Godot is fairly unkind to older hardware before.
Sure, yeah, if somebody is futzing around in 3D, in the Forward+ renderer, and has no idea what they are doing, yeah.
But… broadly?
How… old of hardware are you talking about?
Like, 15+ years old?
Also, SDL isn’t … a game engine.
Its… a rendering/input/output layer/library.
Sure, if you want to write your own game engine, you could use SDL… but… that’s a bit much to ask of a novice indie dev, who wants to complete a 3D game that’s maybe roughly as or more graphically advanced than say, Fallout New Vegas, in under what, 3, 4, 5 years?
I did try to use SDL, while it’s like the only library that gets controller support remotely useful (still not ideal, but at least it doesn’t still use DirectInput for everything), it still uses a lot of ancient API, that is only applicable for XP machines.
Also any good modern engines come with well integrated editors, that are like 80% of the reason why they’re popular. I’m making my own engine, and the hardest part is the editor.
Ok, so you are building your own engine, that makes a lot more sense, and you do realize that… the editor itself is actually quite substantial a task, to get everything coherent and also functional.
Honestly, best of luck to you!
No clue if you’ve seen these before, but maybe they could be helpful?
rewriting the editor to be more usable (embeddable into projects),
using Linux API for my own direct media layer iota in ways many did not expect, to add support for things like HD rumble (regular rumble will also use HIDRAW, because of how overcomplicated the evdev rumble is).
BTW, I’m in the process of stripping the D runtime out of iota, so it could join the ranks of SDL, SFML, GLFW, etc.
No, we are not.
We can go back to the basics, focus on not graphical realism, and/or, invent new rendering paradigms that lead to new art styles, and compute with less overhead, have modest system requirements.
It isn’t impossible.
Look at MGS5, Titanfall 2.
Shit looks pretty good, its a decade old, from before all this modern graphical absurdity.
There has literally never been a better time to become an indie dev, make a small team.
No publisher, no marketing.
Just don’t overpromise, and don’t take people’s money untill you actually have a minimum viable product.
Godot is completely open source, and completely free, and quite capable as an engine.
No one is coming to save us, but ourselves, if we choose to.
Unreal 5 alone is responsible for a lot of A-AA games looking like utter shit, both standing still (dithering every-fucking-where) and in motion (enough ghosting to fill a cemetery)
Godot is fairly unkind to old hardware, unfortunately. Much preferable for people to just use SDL or something.
I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard anyone say Godot is fairly unkind to older hardware before.
Sure, yeah, if somebody is futzing around in 3D, in the Forward+ renderer, and has no idea what they are doing, yeah.
But… broadly?
How… old of hardware are you talking about?
Like, 15+ years old?
Also, SDL isn’t … a game engine.
Its… a rendering/input/output layer/library.
Sure, if you want to write your own game engine, you could use SDL… but… that’s a bit much to ask of a novice indie dev, who wants to complete a 3D game that’s maybe roughly as or more graphically advanced than say, Fallout New Vegas, in under what, 3, 4, 5 years?
I did try to use SDL, while it’s like the only library that gets controller support remotely useful (still not ideal, but at least it doesn’t still use DirectInput for everything), it still uses a lot of ancient API, that is only applicable for XP machines.
Also any good modern engines come with well integrated editors, that are like 80% of the reason why they’re popular. I’m making my own engine, and the hardest part is the editor.
Ok, so you are building your own engine, that makes a lot more sense, and you do realize that… the editor itself is actually quite substantial a task, to get everything coherent and also functional.
Honestly, best of luck to you!
No clue if you’ve seen these before, but maybe they could be helpful?
https://david-delassus.medium.com/trying-out-sdl3-by-writing-a-c-game-engine-c9bb13156b74
https://github.com/linkdd/sdl-game-engine
https://blog.conan.io/2023/07/20/introduction-to-game-dev-with-sdl2.html
My main issue currently are:
BTW, I’m in the process of stripping the D runtime out of iota, so it could join the ranks of SDL, SFML, GLFW, etc.