Angie Dalton

When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows: - Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking. - Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results. So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks. What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files. I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks. What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.

So they built a @RocketLeague car in real life? Wow!!

The “Valve answered in 24 hours” story everyone is sharing has the timeline backwards. And the same thing happened in 2018. Here's how this week actually went. Epic spent almost a year rebuilding its game launcher, then paid an outside testing firm called Keywords Studios to run it against Steam on 13 Windows PCs. Epic's app got from a cold start to the store page in 5.47 seconds on average. Steam took 10.07. Those numbers were legit when Epic ran them. But on October 13, Valve put out a Steam update with one line in the notes about faster startup. Epic posted its chart the next morning. Within hours, one Steam user clocked theirs at 5.23 seconds, and the clip took off. That 5.23 is one person's computer up against Epic's average across 13 machines, though. Other people are seeing anywhere from 5 to 7 seconds depending on their setup, so right now it's basically a tie. How did Valve know to work on startup speed? Epic told everybody. Back in June at Unreal Fest, Epic showed a roadmap for a rebuilt launcher that would start five times faster than its old one. If you're Valve, you had four months to make sure Steam wasn't the slow one when it shipped. Now rewind to 2018. For years Valve took 30% of every game sold on Steam. On November 30, 2018, it cut that to 25% once a game passed $10 million in sales, and 20% past $50 million. Four days later, Epic launched its own store taking 12% from everybody. So twice in eight years, Steam got better a few days before Epic could stand up and explain why it needed to. Most PC gamers are never going to install Epic's launcher. They still just got a Steam that opens way faster, and a lot of the credit goes to the company they love to dunk on.