To be fair, they modified Impact _a lot_. In some of their development streams[1] you can see a heavily extended Weltmeister (Impact's level editor).
Imho, that's fantastic! I love to see devs being able to adapt the engine for their particular game. Likewise, high_impact shouldn't be seen as a “feature-complete” game engine, but rather as a convenient starting point.
In game development this isn't true for better or worse. There is a lot of sunken cost mindset in games that we just go with what we have because we have already invested the time in it and we'll make it work by any means.
Of course you can. Not really sure why this still is tossed about. You just get a shiny turd with a lot less stink. I've made a career of taking people's turds and turning them into things they can now monetize (think old shitty video tape content prepped to be monetized with streaming).
I like this take, but you're saying something different I think, which is more along the lines of "Customers don't care about how the sausage is made".
You didn't polish a turd, you found something that could be valuable to someone and found a way to make it into a polished product, which is great.
But "You can't polish a turd" implies it's actually a turd and there's nothing valuable to be found or the necessary quality thresholds can't be met.
that's just crazy bs, starting from open source code and adding specific features needed for a project is a very common strategy, doesn't mean at all that the tool wasn't good to begin with
phoboslab was downplaying their own efforts by saying that the Cross Code team customised the Impact engine a bunch. My point was that no amount of customisation can turn a bad engine into a good one (you can't polish a turd), so phoboslab definitely deserves credit for building the base engine for Cross Code.
> no amount of customisation can turn a bad engine into a good one (you can't polish a turd)
At a risk of being off-topic and not contributing much to this particular conversation (as I doubt it's relevant to the point you're making), I'd like to note that I often actually find it preferable to "polish a turd" than to start from scratch. It's just much easier for my mind to start putting something that already exists into shape than to stop staring at a blank screen, and in turn it can save me a lot of time even if what I end up with is basically a ship of Theseus. Something something ADHD, I guess.
However, I'm perfectly aware this approach makes little sense anywhere you have to fight to justify the need to get rid of stuff that already "works" to your higher-ups ;)
Imho, that's fantastic! I love to see devs being able to adapt the engine for their particular game. Likewise, high_impact shouldn't be seen as a “feature-complete” game engine, but rather as a convenient starting point.
[1] https://youtu.be/4lZfnM9Ubeo?t=3215