Hacker News: SeanBoocock

No they don't? Most people in tech don't live/work in SV, or even the United States. Even for those that do work in SV, most aren't working for FAANG or elsewhere for comparable comp.

New comment by SeanBoocock in "Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back"

SeanBoocock — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 20:23:22 +0000

I'd add Rome as perhaps a closer model to the sort of high budget, prestige television we're afforded now. First season had a budget in excess of $100 million dollars, a major increase over anything comparable (compare this to The Wire that was filming contemporaneously).

New comment by SeanBoocock in "Open 3D Engine"

SeanBoocock — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 20:37:13 +0000

All of what you describe in terms of data driven entity composition is possible without a true ECS framework. That is what I was referring to and more or less what Unreal or Unity (base, not dots) offer.

ECS is one of the better examples of something that sounds good on paper but in practice, and crucially in production, doesn’t provide the sort of benefits that outweigh the friction it imposes.

There seems to be a myopia online around things like ECS, data oriented programming generally, writing games in C (as opposed to that horrible high level monstrosity C++…), optimization, etc. Those are all fine things in and of themselves (though I’ve never understood the opposition to C++ as anything other than nostalgia), but they are often discussed without being ground in the considerations of building a game. If you want to build a tech demo, great! However, the needs of building a game with hundreds of people, most of whom aren’t engineers, and to a quality/production level that even “simple” things become complicated, demand other things take precedence. I lead a team that facilitates a creative project, not to satisfy my technical desire to have optimal cache or thread utilization in every piece of code. The right tool is the one that gets you closer to the creative goal, and for gameplay code most of the time it probably looks like what Epic or Unity are shipping with their entity frameworks.

New comment by SeanBoocock in "Open 3D Engine"

SeanBoocock — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:16:01 +0000

Speaking from experience, the hardest part about game development isn’t figuring out how to (efficiently) build something, it’s deciding what to build in the first place. The second hardest problem is getting everyone on board with the answer to that. The third is figuring out how to build the content 1000x to support that. Way, way down the list is the runtime performance for a gameplay system.

True ECS systems - and not frameworks that just have things called “entities” which own things called “components” - are hard to work with, almost by definition (ie you have to be very explicit about data layout and dependencies). They add a lot of friction upfront to solving the important and hard problem(s) while purporting to solve something that isn’t actually an issue in most cases (guess what, your N is likely < 10, modern cpus go brrr, etc). If you are working in a domain where you already know something about the performance and input size characteristics - particle systems are the go to example - then maybe ECS makes sense as a framework. Otherwise, I’d advocate for simpler oop approaches with heavy composition.

New comment by SeanBoocock in "Unreal Engine 5 Early Access Release Notes"

SeanBoocock — Mon, 31 May 2021 17:56:03 +0000

One reason would be that you have a future (years) ship date and aren't yet in full production (but close). The sooner you adopt the new environment art and lighting workflows, the less sunk cost you'll have in assets/workflows that are now irrelevant.

There are also staffing implications. If you no longer have to create LODs for your environment art, do you reprioritize your environment art outsource budget? Likewise lighting, if we can hit higher quality with 1/3 of the personnel, where does the budget then go to? The earlier you can get a handle on the implications of these new workflows, the better you'll be able to answer those questions.

New comment by SeanBoocock in "Woke at Work: Why tech firms are trying to run away from politics and failing"

SeanBoocock — Fri, 21 May 2021 23:47:42 +0000

Political opinions are not protected in the same way, nor should they be, as the protected classes you cite (gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc).

New comment by SeanBoocock in "Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter"

SeanBoocock — Tue, 11 May 2021 01:40:27 +0000

That’s exactly what EA did in response to the “EA Spouse” episode. New grad employees are hired as hourly, non-exempt workers and paid overtime for their first couple years. The financial incentive alone doesn’t eliminate crunch, but it is one of many factors that has improved the culture at EA over the last 15 years.

New comment by SeanBoocock in "Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter"

SeanBoocock — Tue, 11 May 2021 00:53:20 +0000

Second this. Have worked at several AAA studios as an engineer. I am currently hiring for junior and senior engineering positions. The number of candidates for the former is two orders of magnitude greater than the latter. The good senior engineers in the game industry don’t have to worry about work, and the compensation largely accounts that. It isn’t FAANG level for the most part, but closer than it was a decade ago and a lot higher than what you would think from the hashtag.

Scientists Believe These Photos Show Mushrooms on Mars–and Proof of Life

SeanBoocock — Sat, 08 May 2021 17:32:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/amp36356445/mushrooms-on-mars-nasa-photos-life-on-mars/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089162

Points: 3

# Comments: 2