[jihiggins]

it's partly because of the engine code. there's even bigger stuff, especially especially if it's a company with any legacy codebase that's 10-20 years old or whatever (e.g. EA / Frostbite.) one i worked on took hours to compile the first time on a machine with 128gb of ram and a threadripper. the onboarding doc suggests getting some coffee at that point haha

a big part of working on them as a generalist ends up being the ability to know how to even navigate something like that (especially since they're often haphazardly documented)

(part of it is that most of the games "fork" the engine rather than using it as a standalone thing)

it's probably not everyone on the team building that whole thing each time, but yea. hundreds of solutions and millions of LOC isn't unusual

*i just did a quick check with unreal's source, it's ~20 million LoC (assuming I didn't mess up the filtering somehow)