And if you have written one before, it might take five years. ;)
At least, that was my actual experience at a game studio. The engine team wanted to rewrite the engine but underestimated how much was there, how much was worth keeping, and how much work needed to be done. But that was a long time ago, and the studio’s now on Unreal.
> You can always generate one using LLM if you don’t care about how it actually works.
Lol, right. That might work for some of the runtime parts of a very simple engine, but not the other 90%, especially when you "don't care about how it actually works".
A game engine (like UE or Unity) easily exceeds the complexity of an entire desktop operating system (not necessarily in line count, but in number of features, their diversity and complexity).
I’m certain there’s enough actual game engine code in the datasets that with enough token spend, you could have a platform layer, basic renderer, entities moving around.
There would be absolutely no point in creating one over using one that exists and since there’s no learning that’ll come of it, it’s kinda wasting money.
At least, that was my actual experience at a game studio. The engine team wanted to rewrite the engine but underestimated how much was there, how much was worth keeping, and how much work needed to be done. But that was a long time ago, and the studio’s now on Unreal.