
Unreal Engine 5 is meant to ridicule web developers - ksec
https://www.theolognion.com/unreal-engine-5-is-meant-to-ridicule-web-developers/
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runawaybottle
How does Unreal Engine 5 handle global state management?

It is the most complicated NP hard problem that ever graced web development
and literally stifling our progress on building a drop down box that updates
all to other drop down boxes on the page.

Like, obviously your health bar is a separate component. But when your health
bar updates, how does the other health bar over your characters head also
reflect that change? Just drives me nuts, is there like a variable or
something that they both subscribe to?

And if UE5 did solve this, why didn’t they even mention this technical feat in
their demo? Web developers have entire conferences when this problem was
discovered, but for UE5 to not even bring up this accomplishment makes me
wonder, #conspiracy.

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_bxg1
Generally things like that in games re-render from scratch on every frame.
Since it happens every frame, you don't need state management to push updates
around. Everything just grabs the latest value anyway.

The DOM on the other hand is stateful, and is very slow to mutate, which is
the core problem of high-level web dev and really not something developers
have any control over.

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chacham15
> Since it happens every frame, you don't need state management to push
> updates around. Everything just grabs the latest value anyway.

This is not true or at least only deceptively so. If you think about "global
state" in a game or more specifically in a rendering scene as "all of the
objects in the scene" then the main difference is the lack of acceleration
structures for the web. Most of the objects in a scene are never touched
because AABB or some other structure allows you to cull large number of
objects without ever actually touching them. If objects in the scene change,
you definitely need to update those acceleration structures. Fortunately for
games, those updates are quick and there are typically not that many of them.

~~~
_bxg1
In the web the performance bottleneck is not figuring out what changed, it's
_doing any rendering at all_. Rendering health bars in games is cheap because
they happen on the GPU and because they don't have the sprawling layout
ramifications ("reflow") that UI changes in the DOM do.

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popotamonga
Just today i wanted to inspect a few MB json file to analyze some API data. I
have a $7k custom made developer desktop with all at max. Tried to paste it to
the regular web json inspectors like jsoneditoronline.org, basically just
hanged all the browsers. Had to spend some time to search for a proper native
tool that barely got the job done for what i needed.

Is it so hard? what gives?

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wayneftw
What tool did you end up using?

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popotamonga
[https://github.com/WelliSolutions/HugeJsonViewer](https://github.com/WelliSolutions/HugeJsonViewer)

~~~
wojtczyk
vi can easily deal with hundreds of MB if not multiple GB on your custom made
machine.

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nojvek
Ha! This was my first thought when I saw the demo. “Am I in the wrong
industry? Why the hell does a megabyte of JavaScript take a second to startup?
They’re doing millions of triangles and even a simple line chart hangs chrome
if more than 1000 points. WTF!”

Dom is too complicated. We really need a much simpler primitives pipeline
optimized for performance.

We need a binary JavaScript. Just parsing it takes a long time.

The other demo that’s really impressive is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

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pseudobry
Why is this flagged? I'm a web developer and think this was hilarious!

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rvz
Most readers here don't have any sense of humour and can't take a joke! %:-O)

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tekkk
Yes I know it's parody, but I don't really understand how it is web
developers' fault that browsers aren't as powerful as native applications. Web
is old, haphazardly planned standard for which nobody really had any idea
where it was going. So there's a reason why it's all so cluttered and I still
have to check my website in various devices and browsers before deploying it
to my users. If using advanced tools like SPA frameworks is the only way to
retain my sanity, I'm going to use them. (And yes the author also parodied the
churn of web technologies, not going to deny that)

Perhaps there should be a fast alternative to the current web, where the
biggest goal is to serve pages with lighting speed. It could be architected
from ground up to come with built-in SPA support, that would load the pages in
chunks while offering a smooth browsing experience. It could automatically
adjust to the device and the network speed of the user, and have all the
legacy cruft of the old web removed. So basically like AMP, but without
Google's greedy fingers.

Yet the chances of that happening is probably zero, as where's the money in
that. A secondary web just for power-users? Hmm, yeah let's see whose going to
allocate resources maintaining that.

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tomcooks
Fell for it like a dumbass, mainly because I agree 101% to the complaints
listed in the article.

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williamdclt
This is mildly funny but a bit of a cheap shot, I'd be more interested in "why
is web dev so far behind videogames in terms of performances". Either the
author doesn't know and is being cynical/sarcastic/devaluating to sound smart,
either they do and could teach the rest of us a thing or two but chose to
belittle webdev instead.

Edit: I just realised this is a parody website. Fair enough then, this is
their editorial line!

~~~
_bxg1
I mean, I would still agree with what you said knowing it's a parody.

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dwheeler
I laughed harder and harder as I kept reading. Fun!

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bavell
He got me for a sec there, I almost didn't notice how similar the name of this
site (The Olongnion) is to The Onion...

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qubex
Never seen this parody site before. Droll.

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_bxg1
What a lazy, unfunny parody.

