Discussion Wicked Engine - Your thoughts, resident game developers?

[igor_kavinski]

The Code-oriented And Lightweight Wicked Engine Now Supports SSGI

Wicked Engine, a small and fast experimental open-source C++ 3D engine with a modern renderer supporting different platforms, has received multiple updates, including a reworked FPS sample, voxel-based 3D pathfinding and line of sight occlusion testing, SSGI support, and many more.

80.lv

Looks pretty cool. What do professional game developers on this forum (I think @HurleyBird is one?) think about it?

Also, @VirtualLarry , does this pique your interest?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Also, @VirtualLarry , does this pique your interest?

Maybe in my former years. Frontal-temporal dementia is a b*tch.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Frontal-temporal dementia is a b*tch.

TBH, you are doing really well if you actually suffer from that.

 

[Sgraffite]

I have been learning Godot as of late and really liking it. I don't know when you would want to choose this one over the other choices out there though.

 

[NTMBK]

The pathfinding demos in that post are pretty rough. Grid based pathfinding doesn't tend to scale well to large open areas, navmeshes have been the typical approach for a long time now. (Admittedly I haven't dug into the source code to see if he's implemented any clever tricks like jump point search.)

Looks like a fun toy and a cool personal project, but not something I'd consider for work.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Looks like a fun toy and a cool personal project, but not something I'd consider for work.

Don't mind but would you be willing to list some games you've worked on?

 

[NTMBK]

Don't mind but would you be willing to list some games you've worked on?

Don't want to dox myself But nothing super high profile. (Hopefully my current project will be a bit more successful!)

 

[igor_kavinski]

(Hopefully my current project will be a bit more successful!)

What engine are you using for that? What's your preferred engine in general?

 

[NTMBK]

What engine are you using for that? What's your preferred engine in general?

We're on Unreal 5- it's certainly not a perfect engine and has plenty of issues, but it's a decent option all things considered.

 

[igor_kavinski]

We're on Unreal 5- it's certainly not a perfect engine and has plenty of issues, but it's a decent option all things considered.

Ah. Finally maybe I can have important questions answered about the future of graphics in games.

1) Are you implementing hardware raytracing or software RT (Lumen) or both?

2) Is it conceivable that at some point, pre-baked lighting will become a thing of the past in almost every game from medium to large game studios? I understand that indie and smaller studios may not have much use for complex graphics in their games.

3) How long is 8GB VRAM going to remain acceptable at 1080p?

4) Is UE5 TSR good enough that a developer can just use that and not bother about supporting FSR, DLSS and XeSS?

5) How hard is MacOS development using UE5? Is it a matter of just loading the project on a Mac, changing some settings and maybe some code and the game achieves native performance and able to use the maximum capabilities of Apple's M1/M2/M3 GPU cores?

6) What do programmers in game studios do in their spare time? After finishing the main game engine and tooling work, I suppose they don't have much left to do so what do they do with that available time? R&D for future direction? Messing around with SDKs of other platforms to see how well the game will run on them and see if it can be commercially viable to release the game on those platforms?

7) Suppose Tim Sweeney wakes up tomorrow and suddenly has the kind of crazy milking thoughts that destroyed developers' confidence in the Unity game engine. What options would your studio have to fall back to? What would be the damage in terms of dollars or amount of time wasted in porting the game to a new engine?

8) Is it possible to design a game to be engine agnostic?