My experience with writing a game engine as a team and a call for another attempt

Number 3 and 4 are the biggest problems. What are the guys with little experience supposed to do if they can't do the heavy lifting. If you have to teach them everything you end up spending your already sparse hobby time on training plus developing an engine. Also if people are not on the same page you can't even communicate ideas, so you have to go down to the most crude or common denominator.

Problem 4 is also a challenge. Few people are wise enough to see that a well made project can get you a nice job. So they are somehow motivated to do a non-paying intern job, where they get slaved through months of hard work without pay, but when it comes to their own collaborative hobby projects they are neither willing to spend the time or be reliable/dependable and organized.

So yeah. I've tried it a lot with other people. It never worked, especially with people who disagree with everything, come up with crazy ideas, suggest you do the nasty work and become really unreliable and leave you with lots of work and no structure. Or you have a brilliant talent who can't teamwork ends up coding half of the code base in a direction nobody knows what to do with or even wanted. Those people who are willing to really work with you sooner or later realize, without money they aren't really motivated and try to look for simpler work with salary or immediate pay.

I wrote many small renderers that just render stuff onto the screen and that support some graphical feature like shadow mapping or global illumination via Cone tracing, with the cone tracing renderer being my biggest project so far (that was my bachelor thesis).

Yeah, I mean, you had your own motivation and that is why you followed through.

Anyway, I would like to participate in such a project. I don't have a lot of experience in the APIs other than the math (wrote a direct lighting raytracer), so if you could use someone with that level of experience, I would be in :-) Wish you best of luck.

/r/GraphicsProgramming Thread