1) In principle I totally agree. Its a great ideal and one that we should strive towards.
<warning>Opinion based observations approaching</warning>
2) Practicality-wise it doesn't work (and it has been tried, plenty of times). Note, most of these are observations :-
a) Developers like to learn by doing, I for instance often rewrite things I've written before just to try it as different way - if its a hobby for you (rather than a business decision) you have more than the justification to do this.
b) Often people are in a hurry, they want it done now! (tm) and that sometimes means sacrificing doing things in a data / view decoupled manner.
c) Now and again the solution tied to the renderer and/or platform is more efficient - and we all know how games developers are obsessed with performance.
d) Style/Convience/Correctness - there are lots of reusable components out there. Many of which would get used except they're not written how the potential user would write them. Maybe the style of the API isn't natural to them. Maybe the library is buggy. Maybe the developer just prefers to work with code that they implicitly understand since they wrote it. None of these things stop the developer technically using the library - but they slow people down - and thats enough to stop people using it.
e) Applicability - you can't just assume that everything everywhere can be wrapped up into an reusable API that works out of the box. AI for instance is such a fuzzy area frameworks are notourious hard to build and make useful. Editing agreed - infact I'm working on an Eclipse plugin for tilemaps as we speak - however generic editors tend to be cumbersome.
The end of the day the things that become libraries that are useful has to be sufficinet complex to justify it. For instance, model loaders. OBJ infact is a great example. If you've already got a rendering method (be in Java2D, DirectX, Scenegraph or OpenGL) writing the loader for the pure data and rendering is trivial. "So!?" you say "you could still reuse it!" - well yes you could, or you could spend a couple hours writing your own that you know works, know the code to fix it and feel the API is comfortable to use.
All of that said, I'd applaud any effort in this direction
If you manage to get enough agreement on enough areas you could have a great goer on your hands. As I said, I'm working on some editing tools at the moment.
Kev
Structured answer :
1) Okay, I think many people think so, they just aren't ready to do so.
2) Oh, yes maybe, but it's a risk to be taken, isn't it ?
a) How true it is, I precisely have rewritten Gamma 4 or 5 times since I first started it.. However, rewritting certain parts of these "shared libraries" couldn't have a negative effect..
b) It's also true, and I already had a thought about that : one can do his game in a completely specific way, and then when all is working, either he or other motivated people can split the "generic" and "specific" parts of his work. If we follow this way, we will arrive at a point where there is no longer generic part in everybody's work (excepted new techonologies) and, say, it will look like good news.
c) Performances are a lesser and lesser important problem, as the harware evolves.. but it's true anyway. So for example with an OBJ loader, there is a generic data structure that can be converted when the model loads and then it's fully optimized because in the native format of the SG. For animations it's a little bit harder, because we have to update data each frame (and compute inter-frames..), we should implement things in the SG/renderer itself, so it's using directly the generic structure.
d) Oh, here's a problem I can't fix.. I can't tell other programmers how they should do (in fact, I should find for myself how to do that..)
e) It's sure you always have specific parts in a game, and for generic AI is maybe no the better example, I agree... And for Editing I have some great ideas just waiting to be re-implemented. I didn't thought exactly of a "generic level editor" but of a "set of components you can use to easily build your own level editor", you see ?
Seeing the numbers of answers to my post.. I don't think I will gain much support soon, so what I have to do is go, go, go and program as much as I can, and to prove my approach is the better.. (could be the worst too..)
