I believe you are refering to developing cutting edge techniques. A "universal" library will provide whatever is not cutting-edge. Do you create your own front-end buttons and list gadgets? Do you write your own file-access functions? Of course not! I'm to young to know first hand, but some "old fogeys" have told me about their experiences in writing these basic techniques into their old DOS games, because DOS didn't provide an efficient enough solution. That was cutting edge.
Modern games focus on 3D graphics, multi-player communication, more realistic physics, etc. A game library should provide the basic funcitonality to allow game programmers to focus on what they truly need to invent, rather than a "better" wheel. Game libraries could even provide (slow and inefficient) cutting-edge techniques, which could be used as skeleton code while the programmers get other aspects of the program ready (of course that code will _never_ go into the shipping product! ).
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I believe you are refering to developing cutting edge techniques. A "universal" library will provide whatever is not cutting-edge. Do you create your own front-end buttons and list gadgets? Do you write your own file-access functions? Of course not! I'm to young to know first hand, but some "old fogeys" have told me about their experiences in writing these basic techniques into their old DOS games, because DOS didn't provide an efficient enough solution. That was cutting edge.
Modern games focus on 3D graphics, multi-player communication, more realistic physics, etc. A game library should provide the basic funcitonality to allow game programmers to focus on what they truly need to invent, rather than a "better" wheel. Game libraries could even provide (slow and inefficient) cutting-edge techniques, which could be used as skeleton code while the programmers get other aspects of the program ready (of course that code will _never_ go into the shipping product! ).