eli5: For games that are in development for long stretches of time (like cyberpunk – 8yrs), how do developers deal with advancing technology?

Question

Or are games like Cyberpunk or Red Dead just made with early-mid 2010’s tech?

Edit: to clarify, development didn’t actually start 8 years ago, but rather the game was announced 8 years ago. Thanks to the commenters for letting me know!

In: Technology

Answer 1

Interfaces/APIs or abstraction layers.

Everything talks to the engine via an interface or api. A layer between what you need for the game: textures, movement, physics calculations etc

You want to draw a circle so you call drawCircle() method in your code. Now you don’t care how the engine draws the circle but even more importantly all the code that the team uses is written so that they don’t have to.

The layer that actually does the drawing of the circle can be totally rewritten if need be but everyone else who uses it wouldn’t even know. Just update their dependencies.

Of course there are the bugs you have to deal with and the occasional deprecated call but other than that you start and finish doing the same work.