Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

racenis.github.io

659 points · racenis · 9 days ago

Hello everyone, I would like to see if there is any interest in this little project that I have been working on for the past few years.

Could be relevant, seeing the direction in which the mainstream game engines are going.

I didn't really like any of the already existing options, so I tried to make my own and it turned out to be easier than expected.

It's sort of like a low-budget Unreal/Source, but with open-world streaming support and it is free and open source. Very old-school. But optimized for more modern hardware. Very fast too.

Still not production ready, but it seems like it is mostly working.

I want to finish a few larger projects with it to see what happens.

Btw, the name is probably temporary.

238 comments

mlekoszek · 9 days ago

"Some might say "just get a better computer". This is why getting a better computer is bad:
1. Affordance: A lot of people, especially from 3rd world countries are very poor and can't afford to buy hardware to run Turbobloat.
2. e-Waste: Producing computer chips is very bad on the environment. If modern software wasn't Turbobloated you would buy new hardware only when the previous hardware broke and wasn't repairable.

3. Not putting up with Turbobloat: Why spend money on another computer if you already have one that works perfectly fine? Just because of someone else's turbobloat? You could buy 1000 cans of Dr. Pepper instead."

Took the words from my mouth. What a great project. Please keep posting your progress.

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tsumnia · 9 days ago

"A thing should be a thing. It should not be a bunch of things pretending to be a single thing. With nodes you have to pretend that a collection of things is a single thing."

Just want to say this line was great, very Terry Pratchett. Feels like something Sam Vimes would think during a particularly complex investigation. I love it and hope you keep it moving forward.

Haven't gotten a chance to mess around with it, but I have some ideas for my AI projects that might be able to really utilize it.

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amjoshuamichael · 9 days ago

I'm starting to believe there is an external force that drives down the quality of game engines over time. In most tech, the things that catch on are the things that are the easiest to develop curriculum for. The shape of a node-based editor like Unity is uniquely suited to explaining over a number of classes. (Source: I had to learn Unity at my University) On the other hand, an engine like raylib can be grokked in an afternoon, so a university-level raylib class wouldn't work. So you have all these amateur game developers and programmers coming out of diploma mills, and all they know is Unity/Unreal, so companies hire Unity/Unreal, so universities teach it, etc. See also: Java being popular. Then of course, all these companies have wildly different needs for their Unity projects, so Unity, being a for-profit company that serves its customers and not a single disgruntled programmer, has to conform their engine. So you end up with 'turbobloat.' (amazing term, btw)

The Half-Life and Morrowind engines are in a unique situation where they're put together by enthusiastic programmers who are paid to develop stuff they think is cool. You end up with minimal engines and great tech, suited to the needs of professional game developers.

This seems like something that sits in between a raylib and a Unity. I haven't used it, but I worry that it's doesn't do enough to appeal to amateur programmers, but it does too much to appeal to the kind of programmer who wants a smaller engine. I could be very wrong though, I hope to be very wrong. Seems like the performance here is very nice and it's very well put together. There's definitely a wave of developers coming out frustrated from Unity right now. As the nostalgia cycle moves to the 2000's, there's a very real demand to play and create games that are no more graphically complex than Half-Life 2.

Anyway, great project. Great web design. Documentation is written in a nice voice.

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rootnod3 · 9 days ago

I wholeheartedly agree with the turbo bloat problem. Machines are so much more powerful nowadays, but most programs feel actually slower than before.

Very cool project. And the website design is A+

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fidotron · 9 days ago

> Most Unity games look like very bad, even with fancy shaders, normal mapping and other techniques.

This seems to be an increasingly common point of view among those of a certain age.

It is definitely the case that the art of a certain sort of texture mapping has been lost. The example I go back to is Ikaruga, where the backgrounds are simply way better than they have any right to be, especially a very simple forest effect early on. Some of the PS2 era train simulators also manage this.

The problem is these all fall apart when you have a strong directional light source like the sun pointed at shiny objects, and the player moves around. If you want to do overcast environments with zero dynamic objects though you totally could bypass a lot of modern hacks.

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