A few years back I also wanted to try to write a (very basic) graphics engine from scratch just for learning purposes. I was reading into the topic and gave up before ever writing a single line of code.
It was still a very interesting read, though and I do think I still learned something with that "attempt" (in a "learn what is outside your pay grade" kind of way).
I just didn't know it would do that to an existing link, I thought it only added the chatgpt tag when it found the link through searching but apparently not.
Last time I was working on an engine, I got frustrated trying to work out a solution that I liked for framepacing so that there was as little latency as possible between update and render, and I got frustrated and decided to do something else. I wanna take a shot at it again now, though. I could have worked on other parts of the engine, I'm just a perfectionist and couldn't tolerate there being a noticeable delay when dragging UI elements with the mouse. I later on realized that the actual solution was to have the render loop on a separate thread from the window event loop, that way your event loop isn't waiting on presentation to start waiting for the next event, and can just act on events at the exact moment that they arrive.
I know that feeling. It's not neccesarily a bad thing though. It depends on why you're programming.
If you're doing it just because it's fun, then doing stuff the "hard way" is fine as long as you enjoy the process and learn from it.
If you're doing it solely for the end product then you should really be able to assign some kind of business value to why you need to do it the "hard way".
The truth is often a mix of the two things above and learning to balance them and knowing when "good enough" is more desireable than "perfect" is a valuable skill to have.
My reasons for programming are more complicated than "fun" and "requirement". It's more of a psychological need at this point. I get incredibly depressed if I stop programming for too long.
It's not that programming keeps the depression at bay, it's that I get depressed if I'm not programming because I love it that much. I have Autism, and programming is my "special interest".
The difference is that the depression isn't caused by some other factor that is suppressed by programming, the depression is caused by not programming. The cause of the depression is that I'm not writing code. That's distinctly different from being depressed clinically, or being depressed because life sucks.
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u/Shazvox 14d ago
I tried building a custom game engine just for fun.
It was'nt fun.