I’d go an order of complexity above again. The real comparison is to the browser, particularly for general purpose engines like Unreal and Unity. I’d hazard most game engine teams are bigger than most browser teams.
I disagree. Modern web browsers are the most complicated pieces of technology we have today. The amount of work that goes into sandboxing and security alone probably eclipses the complexity of game engines.
That seems very optimistic when compared to some of the bigger engineering projects we have going as humanity. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines as a whole system (including the multiple computer networks and their software) are much more complex than browsers, to say nothing of one-offs like the ISS (lots of cutting edge hardware but also full of software) and the systems controlling modern factories. Browsers don't even come close.
I think it's kind of hard to quantify complexity in a way that compares nicely across domains. For example, a lot of the complexity in a browser comes from needing to service ~billions of users across thousands of devices using loosely implemented standards. This is quite a different problem to building an aircraft carrier, where you're going to run in to hard engineering and physics problems but you only have to target ~10k well trained users.
Not when you start. While UE5 is no doubt orders of magnitude more complex than any web framework, no one sets out to write UE5. In fact most people start writing their own game engine because they want something a lot less complex and more tailored than what is available.
If you have the right background knocking out a very simple game engine isn't hard. Many people do it as part of a university course. The problem is that your 'simple' game engine ends up being not that simple very quickly once you start adding features.
Yea, my point was related to why people so often write their own game engine (and so rarely write their own browser). Writing your own game engine for your own game looks fun and easy from the outset. And in fact, depending on your game, writing a game engine that lets you ship that one game doesn't even have to be complex.
Right but there are smaller scale browser-like things as well which have a more vibrant DIY scene like Gopher, Gemini and so on. We shouldn't take a narrow view on what a browser is if we're not going to do that for a game engine.
