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by Manishearth 3284 days ago
Games are a completely different problem space. "styling" is a concept that games don't have; games don't deal with deciding which thing has which style at runtime. Browsers do, because they are just given CSS and have to handle the cascading and assigning of styles on their own.
2 comments
intoverflow2 3284 days ago
> "styling" is a concept that games don't have

I disagree. Look up how modern material systems work. There absolutely are analogous things going on to CSS in PBR rendering, shaders, multipass compositing etc.

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revelation 3284 days ago
Of course they do, modern games are a complex interaction of many different shaders operating on all levels of abstraction on many different classes of runtime data that they compose, renew and adapt many many times in 16 ms.

Is the whole CSS debacle a particularly unlikely concept to yield anything close to a reasonable performing implementation? Sure, but that is because nobody has applied the pressure necessary. People won't play a game that doesn't consistently meet a 30 ms deadline but they seem to happily put up with 3 seconds to final render and call it "amazing".

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Manishearth 3284 days ago
Shaders are a completely different thing from styling (cascading).

GPUs work here because games fundamentally operate on a list-like datastructure (the display list), with little interdependence.

Styling on the other hand operates on a tree like datastructure (the DOM), with lots of interdependence.

Cascading isn't something games need at all, and if it was, it could be precomputed. THis can't be done in webpages.

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mianos 3284 days ago
Game engines are pretty much completely sitting on complex tree structures. Way more than the DOM. The main reason the DOM all looks so tricky is it is a hack on a hack on a hack. A lot of game engines have been rewritten from scratch many times over.
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Manishearth 3284 days ago
Yes, trees are involved in games too, but not at the level I'm talking about.

You don't have analogues for tree-structure-based "selectors" and anything more than straightforward property inheritance (e.g. inheritance of transformations in a skeleton) in game engines. CSS is much more complex in this aspect.

The DOM having lots of legacy issues is not the reason styling is slow.

CSS is designed for a lot of flexibility and can't be precompiled, which is why it is slow to style.

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