[color="#ff0000"]Moderator Note:
Please take anything in this post with a grain of salt, as the "IHavePoorTaste" account has been banned for the following reasons:

• Originally signed up with an offensive and inappropriate username (since edited by a moderator)
• Is a duplicate of a previously banned problem-user
• Is fairly obviously trolling the forums.

The responses from users are however pretty good considering and may be of some value if you're interested in the topic.[/quote]
What's up with all these "tools" nowadays? Free source game engines? Really? That's depriving programmers the actual work of the game as a whole.

I might sound a little crazy by saying this, but I think it's actually more fun, and to every last bit(literally), to program games more in a "from scratch" kind of way.

I'd rather, instead of with all those "complications" with destructor, constructor, type conversion, polymorphism, OOP, just write all code in a more Boolean logic sort of paradigm.

Instead of using any OOP, define the parts of the code yourself and just comment them, break every aspect of the game's parts piece by piece, layer everything out, get everything necessary and written out before
you start writing code so you know where everything will go and what everything will do, then just do it.

I'm definitely against OOP, I hate it to the core by all means possible. I prefer more of a sort of "functional" programming style in a mostly Boolean logic kind of sense.

Now is this just me? Do others somewhat agree here? I mean sometimes these "tools" may come in handy, like game engines, but understanding what they are and how to make them yourself would be much more rewarding, given the programmer can make one themself with the right tutorials and instructions and can feel accomplished by literally completing every aspect and part of the game yourself, bottom up.

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[color="#1C2837"]What's up with all these "tools" nowadays? Free source game engines? Really? That's depriving programmers the actual work of the game as a whole.
[/quote][color="#1C2837"] [color="#1c2837"]Please tell me ONE, and only ONE reason why the existence of an open source game engine would make it harder for you to make your own.
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[color="#1C2837"]I started messing around with game engines when I was around 12, and had never seen anything close to programming before. And you know what? It was awesome to explore the possibilities, and maybe I could have some problems in college if those did not exist.
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[color="#1c2837"]Im making my own game engine now, by myself, and currently working on the actual game editor.


[color="#1c2837"]Different people have different needs, and not everyone is that into programming, is that into making an engine, or is that into doing stuff from scratch.

What's up with all these "tools" nowadays? Free source game engines? Really? That's depriving programmers the actual work of the game as a whole.

Sure, but it enables designers and artists to build games they previously wouldn't have been able to without learning how to be expert programmers or trying to find expert programmers to work "for" them.

I mean sometimes these "tools" may come in handy, like game engines, but understanding what they are and how to make them yourself would be much more rewarding

It depends. For some people (generally programmers), building the tech is the rewarding part. For others, the rewarding part is shipping a game that people can play. Tools like Unity and UDK enable people to build higher quality games in less time than it would take for most people to build comparable technology.

Ultimately I think having things like UDK, Unity, and CryEngine 3 available to the wide development audience is the best thing to happen to the games industry in a while. Hopefully it will allow more teams to build amazing looking games using existing technology rather than having every person start off by figuring out how to write an engine. For example Adhesive Games, the people behind the amazing looking game Hawken, are mostly artists: http://www.adhesivegames.com/team.html. That team make up is only possible because they have the UDK to handle the hard technical work for them.

I flip between both views with my personal projects. Sometimes I just want to make the game and ignore the tech. Othertimes the tech is the interesting part. It all depends what you're trying to get out of game development and what your personal skills are.

Are you related to Andy Harglesis? Just wondering.

Personally, I find it extremely frustrating when people want to skip the programming part of writing a game. After working for years on a game engine, after many game projects before that, I love learning all I can and taking pride in being able to write every step myself. It frustrates me even more when people don't just want to skip the engine writing, which is alright in some cases, but people want to skip learning how to program at all, and want to write the whole game in Paint or using some fancy GUI. Once you contribute next to zero work to the game mechanics, graphics, logic, why not just write a book? Storyline is important, but making a game takes more than blindly piecing things together. It's like buying a house, sweeping the floors and hanging pictures, having someone repaint the outside, then bragging about how you built a house.

Of course, not everyone is like this. Valve bought the Quake engine, then wound up rewriting a significant portion of it, which led to their own engines. Using another's engines and tools is not inherently bad; it is people who take other's work simply because they want to have the end result, but won't contribute anything towards this goal.