I'm sure there are some lazy devs out there. You don't think so?
Writing basic graphics/engine code to ship games? Not really, no, it's an extremely difficult job that requires wide, up to date knowledge and a lot of focus, and honestly doesn't pay very well compared to similarly difficult engineering jobs. The people who do it are motivated and skilled.
If you listen to developers in their circles where they can speak candidly... they have far harsher criticisms of the hardware and software they're forced to use every day than I probably have on this forum about some games. I guess my issue is that I say what I think with my chest, and you seemingly can't do that anymore without upsetting people.
The issue here is the combination of "speaking candidly" as you generously put it and lack of technical knowledge. When a developer rants about missing API features, or hardware decisions they don't like, or programming/development processes they think lead to worse code, yeah, they might upset someone, but they're having a high quality technical discussion about a subject
they have knowledge about. When a random forum poster who works in non-games software or not in tech at all inserts themselves into the conversation and starts yelling about how unreal engine is bad or whatever it's useless
and insulting.
At a basic level "devs aren't trying hard enough, devs need to do better" or even "devs need to achieve X, i've seen X achieved, they have no excuse" is just not high quality conversation or based in any kinds of factual reality. Most of the things the angrier posters here demand for have big tradeoffs, frequently opposed to
other things they ask for. Posters also take any complaint a dev has out of context due to a lack of technical knowledge -- they see developer A say something is "difficult" and turn around and call developer B lazy or unskilled because they don't do the "hard" thing -- aside from like, sticking their nose where it doesn't belong, the posters frequently
misunderstand developer A. Difficult problems in software are usually "difficult" in terms of, "this requires we radically change our process for a whole game" or "this expands the possibility for bugs beyond what can be reasonably tested on every project" or "this has tradeoffs we have to careflly work around -- it introduces better perfomance in case A, but
worse performance in case B, however with enough resources we can avoid case B happening
on this specific game"
Maybe a particular game avoid shader stutter because it
has less shader variants because it doesn't contain transparent surfaces that are also, whatever, skinned characters or something, it has very consistent content (all opaque, little vertex animation, few fundamentally different types of FX, etc,) it doesn't expose certain things in the options menu, etc.
Maybe a game has very stable performance becasue it doesn't support certain out of date hardware, it uses techniques which
aren't available on PC without using a ton of VRAM, or bandwidth, or scaling very poorly at high resolutions, etc.
Maybe a game is scalable up to a
locked ~120fps without ever stuttering towards 60 because the game design excludes certain physics situations, doesn't have a complex animation system, has content which allows very controlled streaming, etc.
Maybe some combination of ambitious tech and workflow changes that makes a game look very cutting edge has added risk of things going wrong and the project going over estimate, and shipping without every high priority bug fully locked down!
None of the conversations on this forum are up to this level of technical understanding, but at least the ones that are interested in hearing what devs have to say, curious, open minded, and speculating are less infuriating than the ones that are furiously angry about whatever tradeoff they don't like this month.
