[samiv]

"Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code."

Also says something about the accumulation of complexity. At that time Carmack (and his team) were able to create a state of the art engine in a few years. Now consider the task today, if you were to create a state of the art engine today it'd take tremendously more work.

[abcde666777]

An interesting thing is I think a lot of it's caused purely by the graphical fidelity. For instance an animated character back then was just a key framed polygon soup - compare that with the convincing humanoids games have now.

And yet often the actual gameplay code itself may only be 2x to 3x more complicated then the days of old.

I think of counterstrike for instance - it's still just guys shooting guns in a constrained arena.

[direwolf20]

But you could create Quake.

[andai]

Quake is peak graphics anyway. We hit diminishing returns after that ;)