[sarchertech]

Casey worked on tooling for AAA games that most certainly needed “that level” of optimization.

Jon Blow worked on numerous AAA games that required “that level” of optimization. And he’s one of the very few developers in the last 15 years who have managed to sell more than a million copies of a game running on a scratch built 3D engine.

You can disagree with their opinions, but they certainly have the experience to back those opinions up.

[gf000]

Well, Minecraft sold far more and it's a scratch built 3d engine isn't it? Popularity is certainly not a technical achievement.

[sarchertech]

Minecraft doesn't use an off the shelf engine, but I wouldn't really call Minecraft scratch built. It's built on top of LWJGL.

Popularity isn't a technical achievement in itself. But what is a technical achievement is that he built a visually impressive 3d engine that worked well enough for over a million people to buy it at a time when almost no one else was doing this. Minecraft was released nearly 10 years earlier--before Unity and Unreal had completely taken over.

I'm also not saying that the witness engine is somehow better than anything else out there, but it's a significant enough technical accomplishment that along with Jon Blow's other work, he has the experience to back up his opinions.

I've also never seen the critique that Jon Blow is just an influencer with no relevant experience from anyone with equivalent relevant experience. I've seen other experienced game devs who disagree with him, but I've never seen them say that he doesn't have the experience to have them.

[pjmlp]

Only because there are no native OpenGL bindings for Java from Khronos, hence LWJGL.

[sarchertech]

I don't have any experience with Java game development, but I was under the impression that LWJGL provided more than just OpenGL bindings.

[pdpi]

Well, it's more than just OpenGL bindings mostly because it's bindings for a bazillion other things too. Just look at the javadoc[0]. The non-binding stuff in there is just utilities to make the bindings at least somewhat idiomatic in Java. In practice, LWJGL games are almost always just GLFW games, which I would still qualify as being pretty damn close to "from scratch".

0. https://javadoc.lwjgl.org

[pjmlp]

It is indeed a bit like using SDL, however pure OpenGL bindings like JOGL have seen better days.

Also, if you are doing a game in Java, you also need bindings for sound APIs, and other ones that traditionally only care about C, thus you end up with something like LWJGL anyway.