What was the main learning you got from building the engine? Was there some feature you wanted that no other engine at the time had? If you built an engine today, what would you do differently?

I thought most of the existing engines out there were too complicated, so I wanted it to be easy to use. Probably that's also why it became that popular.

For a modern engine today - I think the architecture of the engine would look different - and would focus more on creating and organizing content then mostly on rendering.

I was involved in 3D back then wenn Irrlicht & Co had some traction:

Todays graphics engine look completely different than the first flexibel pipelines around 2002-2005, and the rise of AI for usage during rendering will change the tech paradigms further (for the younger ones: In 2001, NVidia announced the Geforce1, we had 1 pixel shader and 1 vertex shader :-D LOL)

I hope Dr Fernando E. Rosas writes a book for non-technical people someday. All of his research topics are super interesting and it would be cool to have him explain how they're connected in his mind in a way that's more accessible.

yeah, imagine only creating software when you know it's useful by every measure.

interestingly, i find that many of the things that also make money aren't even really useful, they just exist and people want them for some obscure reason. so you're right, and also it might actually lead to making money anyway because what might seem useless doesn't exclude valuable.

> clutter the ecosystem what ecosystem? > diverts community to spent time on "useless" projects what community? > addressing real-world challenges. what challenges?

i'm curious to know what the criteria or thresholds are for releasing vs not releasing.

ecosystem of packages, libraries, gems, crates or what the fuck people calling this things these days.

community of programmers within different technology stacks.

challenges to make software simpler, smaller and faster, to maintain software and prevent modern bloat from eating up gigahz of cycles on many cores.

I think this is uniform across Germany, and I think the legal requirement might be either be registered or have an appointment to be registered, similar to other legally required appointments, which (from my understanding) causes issues regarding endless-reschedule loopholes.

to be fair, many countries' governments have this same issue, and even when they do something the UX feels like something from 2002. The thing is, its complex, often the job pays way below market rate and government jobs often have rigid salary tiers, hiring might not be done like a normal tech co. as you might also have specific public servants to do it, and then you have culture, which might rule out certain people or cultivate attitudes towards work. Beyond that, in developed democracies like Germany, what gets funded long enough to be pushed to production can depend on election cycles and public opinion. Additionally, the big 4 have a big presence in developed countries and they often get these 100 million <currency> contracts to do stuff like that and... enough said.

This is a major problem. It's hard to attract talent when you have low incomes and an inflexible work culture. The incentives just aren't there.

Let's say Berlin wanted to hire me tomorrow to do the same exact work for them. That would mean return to office, fixed schedule, a return to rigid corporate culture, and a significant drop in income.

A friend of mine works in government IT, and the stories are both hilarious and sad. Some people in the Greens are afraid of Wi-Fi waves...

Well yes, a certain number of the public service or political parties will believe things that are simply false (whether legitimately or as a means to serve their goals), in fact, many political parties in Germany and other developed countries are based entirely on false premises to the extent of being named after them. But this is actually the point of democracy, so as much as the observation is humorous it also highlights a certain level of naivety.

Digging even a little into German history reveals why the whole digitalisation and bureaucracy situation is the way it is. In fact, it also shows a side that if one doesn't believe that our tech-centric disruption culture is a corruption of society and people, then one might actually be the one who is delusional. Remember, there's a whole class of people out there who depend heavily on things working the way they do - no so much for gain, but for the benefit that any 'digital' alternative may cripple them (e.g. many elderly, disabled, and poor members of society). To some, providing a secondary tool isn't simply an alternative, it's the first step towards a complete replacement of the thing they find more useful (a good example of this is 'cashless societies').

Not to mention being in favor of homeopathy. The only people who annoy me more than the greens is all the other major parties. Should have moved to the Netherlands...

yes, this isn't against Germany specifically.

This is highly useful. You could take the idea, generalize it to be reusable for any German form, and make a plan to develop such a thing as open source with funding from: prototypefund.de as their applications close end of the month.

'many people' - less than a third of germans live in big cities. The vast majority of adults have licenses, almost all from the stats I see.

There are many cars and many car owners and many car drivers in Germany, I think the stat is something like >3/4s Germans own cars. There happens to be public transport and bicycle infrastructure proportionate to the density of a region (ie more in cities), but lots of Germany is still rural, sparsely populated, and dominated by cars for getting around. If you aren't from/in Germany and visit it, you'll see how popular cars are here and that is unlikely to change soon.