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No, you missed my point. I'm perfectly clear why Jonathan Blow made it's own engine and why anyone who's capable of that would want the same thing. I was talking about the article and about some members of the game community and for that I have two criticisms

First: in the article she says that they struggled on one very complex project while using Unity. And then she says (or that's my understanding) that she made a completely different project on her own engine. That's why I said apples and oranges. I can't build unity, u4 or frostibe from scratch but if you want Pong or a simple platformer, sure, I can do that from nothing. That would be me saying: "well I had serious problems recreating the Witness in Unity but look at my space invaders which i made in Elm for browser without an engine".

The second problem I have is with some members of the gamedev community. Feel like a lot of people are ready to jump on the "I wish the source was available" train while very few of them (or at least that's my perception) know what to do with the engine source. Actually I could extend this point to a lot of advocate of the open source community. There is this false perception that anyone can fix anything that's broken because the source is available and yet a lot of those apps are sadly still very much broken and sometimes the authors of those apps have difficulties in finding people who might help them. But if you read any post about it online it's usually "closed source sucks and open source is brilliant cause we can always fix that anytime".

Sorry, this is a lot of generalization and obviously not everyone is like that but I tried to make point clearer this time 'this all.




Okay.

About the second problem, I think it is one of control. Source code access at least gives you a fighting chance.

That said, I have used Qt a couple times, and never dared to delve in its source code, it's just too big. If I have a problem, I just work around it. If you want control over your engine/framework, you pretty much have to have written it in the first place.


Here I agree very much with you. With stuff so complex I can't imagine going through all that code. That's why I don't get people saying "if only I had the this or that source code".


Well, there is a middle ground: when you haven't written that big framework/engine, but could have, delving into the source code in an as-needed basis may sound like a decent option.

Of course, you're hoping your framework is fit enough for your purpose, so that you rarely have to inspect it —if at all.




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