it drives me insane that good tracing profiler tools are basically confined to certain niche domains and/or are insanely expensive (or some weird cloud based shit). instrumenting programs (printf or otherwise) is dumb as hell when all desktop usermode (and even most embedded chips worth coding for) have the capability of instruction level trace. tools have sweet graphical timelines and stuff and it's killer.

basically, all programming should be writing requirements as a custom level for Shenzhen I/O

I haven’t used it personally, but I always heard that VSS was a complete train wreck.

Gamedev programming probably hit a low point for me when XBox One and WiiU came around. Those were some truly awful experiences.

> Whole Tomato coding assistance

This was far before Copilot and it was the superbest extension for VC++6 & up.

I like REPL, but you can be quite fast with a Edit-Compile-Run cycle. But that require settings a test harness and have the run phase be a test run. It's not as fast and experimental as an REPL, but can be quite nice if you know the test cases for your code.

> 3) Edit and Continue C++ in debugger IDE all day on target without ever bothering to stop the game. (Yes, this took some coding discipline to maintain.)

Similar experiences but with Java and Eclipse: editing code while it's running is amazing. And yet, far too often, since moving on from Java to Swift, even with the "proper" Instruments, the actual best I've had has been debug-by-print in much slower cycles... and sometimes not even that, when things went wrong in SwiftUI I might as well have been an ancient Roman haruspex reading entrails for all the good it did.

And at the time, everyone was complaining about Eclipse.

That was pretty much my experience developing a PS2/Dreamcast game in the 2000-2001 timeframe when working on the PC build, the _REASON_ I did so was because the PC port ran on 3dfx and that crashed the OS every 2nd-4th start so restarting was painful, being able to edit-continue was a godsend.

That said, still using debugger driven development and edit-continue to this day and marvel at the lack of experience of people touting Lisp or Erlang or whatever as the only places in the world with some kind of hot-code replacement.

Live coding is making a comeback. I predict it for 2027. LLMs can and have made hot code loaders for any existing language, and make trivial the nasty bugs that used to plague JIT developers (like broken stack frames).

> having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex ...

> Warcraft 1 had just 4 programmers

This to me sounds like the market for games has changed, such that larger projects are now more viable. Smaller projects with a handful of people may still be viable, but look tiny in comparison.

One of my favourite games of that era, Thief, also had a very small team.

Warcraft 1 was one of my favourite games from my childhood. Probably took me 14 months to beat that one level I always got stuck on.

>Warcraft 1 (my first RTS) had just 4 programmers. And only one of them was on the project the whole time. And the entire project was only 14 months. <

Nice but this isnt even the half of the story: According to ChatGPT, the whole team was "32 people in professional roles", so 8x times of number of programmers. And that ratio even became extremer in the last decades.

That and more veteran talent, including laterals, ending up in the freewheeling spaces (giconomy burnout, enough personal financial stability, crowdfunding, alternate publishing/work-life models, etc.)... including access to their knowledge and experience.

But can't we then say that software engineering *has* advanced, when the tooling has improved?

Yeah, the engines help a lot with rendering, physics, and scene/level building/making custom tooling, and a bunch of other things. They are honestly amazing tools.

AAA and indies now use the same engines for the most part

In game dev however, there's a lot fewer reliable open source tools around. You have a game engine, a small number of great plugins, and a lot of dodgy stuff. You have to/get to make a lot of things yourself.

The scope and complexity of indie games, even allowing for this, is still increasing staggeringly.

...and don't get me started on unreal engine physics and pathfinding issues, or rendering bugs in unity

Yes, AI tooling.

Indie games didn't get THIS good because of Unity and Godot, if you think that you're deluding yourself.

I've done amateur and professional game-dev and Unity and Godot existing don't make making an FPS any easier than before, engines have existed for a long time.

A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.

This is only possible with AI.

When I compare Electron with Delphi and VB, we have regressed by light years.

And for the pixel perfect complaints, it only shows lack of care to not have learnt how layout managers work.

Software of the early 2000s pretty much looks the same as today, quality has typically even regressed. Busy-work around the development process doesn't automatically result in better software.

The simple observation is that you're very young, if the js/rails the beginning of time.

We have veritable supercomputers, and most software is as sluggish or more sluggish than in 2000s.

There are some local improvements, but overall software is just as shitty and buggy as 20-30 years ago, and most of it doesn't do anything different