[stonewareslord]

I agree with your assessment.

> a stack made for a single game is not a game engine.

For a concrete example: the newest Lego game, Star Wars the Complete Saga, had a complete engine rewrite ("NTT") and the new game is the only one that runs it. I wonder what term the author would use to describe NTT, which isn't designed to run a single game or have a community.

[ohgodplsno]

What does a complete engine rewrite mean ? Is it just a new renderer with deferred shading ? Is it a bunch of new gameplay tools ? Is it a start-from-scratch thing ? (Which would be absolutely stupid).

Game engines are more of an ecosystem. Yes, the community is a thing because the devs seem to be a small indie group that uses Godot so they can ask for assistance, but Frostbite does not have such a thing (well, maybe internally at EA), and yet noone would say it's not an engine. As long as, through an upgrade, your engine keeps the same way of working and you're familiar with it, it is an engine as a whole. UE and Unity are two different engines because the workflows are different. But UE4.0 to UE5.0 is still the same engine, you won't take that much longer to get back in the groove.

[ratww]

> Game engines are more of an ecosystem

Not really. In the case of Unreal/Unity/Godot (and perhaps things like Quake and Source before it), sure. But there is definitely more to engines than this, which is the argument being made.

We probably need a better term to differentiate traditional engines from the big ones that come with an integrated editor. But until we do, there are many sizes of engines.

> As long as, through an upgrade, your engine keeps the same way of working and you're familiar with it, it is an engine as a whole

Again, this is the controversial part. Engines are traditionally not about editors and workflows and whatnot. Sure the term has changed recently and a lot of people now have this impression, but until there's new terms, engines come in different sizes.

[ohgodplsno]

You can still find rotary engines in cars, that doesn't mean that the first thing that comes to literally everyone's mind when you mention engines is the classic combustion engine with cylinders.

Lots of big claims about engines traditionally not being about editors, but nothing to back that up. Engines have always referred to the whole package, and to something somewhat reusable. Saying "recently" and mentioning the Quake Engine before makes me question your definition of recent. Thirty years old in an industry that's barely 50 if you count the first popular games like Oregon Trail? Where do you fit Monkey Island, using the SCUMM Engine in 1990 ? You don't see anyone talking about the Celeste Engine, or the A Link to the Past Engine, because they're bespoke, single purpose implementations.

So, no, engines have pretty much always been about reusable tools, that may or may not bake certain gameplay elements in, but are overall just a tool.

[ratww]

> Lots of big claims about engines traditionally not being about editors, but nothing to back that up

Big claims? What the hell does that mean?

What about Bevy, the engine mentioned in the article this thread refers to? Also, most Rust engines. Also most engines you find in Github.

Or do you want a list? Here's some from the top of my head that I'm familiar with: Love2D, Irrlicht, Torque3D, Solar2D, MUGEN, Nebula, jMonkeyEngine, Panda3D (this one powered several Disney games), Cocos2D (it powered several popular games before Cocos Creator existed), Ogre3D (before having an editor). There's also plenty of Rust ones: Bevy itself, Amethyst, I could do more research, but I suggest checking Wikipedia.

This is also not counting studio-specific scriptable engines. I worked on a few and we didn't need scene editors, because we just used 3D editors and tags. That's definitely an engine, despite not having the tools you claim to be necessary.

You can make the case for those engines not be called engines anymore, or maybe engines with editors should perhaps be called something like "megaengines" or whatever, but there's definitely more than one type of engine.

Sorry but you can't retroactively change the name of things just because they don't fit your limited knowledge. The "engines must have editors" thinking is something that only happened in the last 10 years, a few years after Unity3D gained popularity, and while some newbies might assume that from this meme, it doesn't really represent the historical use of term or the usage of the term by the industry as a whole.

[seba_dos1]

The difference between SCUMM and something like "Celeste Engine" is that Gilbert and the rest of Lucasfilm Games decided to reuse Maniac Mansion's code for their next titles, while nothing reused Celeste's code (yet). SCUMM even has it in its name ;)