How common is hot reloading in AAA engines?

Very. Most AAA engines support it in some way, primarily because it saves a lot of dev time if we don't have to restart the game in order to see changes made. If I make a change to a script, I want to restart my map or my UI and see it working immediately, rather than shutting the game down, rebuilding, and then restarting everything - especially if the changes I am making require significant startup. A significant amount of development resources go into building tools to help us save time while developing content - think about any task the devs will need to repeat many many times in slightly different ways (e.g. create an item, create a spell, create a quest) and you can see how saving a small amount of time on each iteration can compound into significant cost savings over the course of the project. Support for hot reloading is one such feature.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

• Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
• Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky
• Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
• Frequent Questions: The FAQ