One interesting note was that TempleOS which is called a religious OS had a Commadore64 structure and it was apparently easy to make games on it. You mentioned learning unity, the old game programmers would make ISA games that had no OS overhead, ran on all hardware that supported the instructions which happens less when the engines are abstractions that are designed to run on more abstractions like the OS, which of course costs performance, has more bugs, and basically filters your intentions, as well as every version of the engine, OS and other factors a game developer can't control will degrade their software through no fault of their own.
Thank you very much for these links. One reason why I quickly decided to move away from Unity is that it's such a "big" program to make a relatively simple 2D game. I guess the level of abstraction that modern game engines provide is a double-edged sword in that while it is more accessible to users without a background in programming, it also obscures most of what's going on under the hood. So now game devs (as well as game consumers) accept that modern games have a certain amount of overhead that you live with. And bugs. And incompatibilities.
I moved to Godot because you can totally configure it to suit your needs. You can compile the engine yourself, rewrite the editor, etc. When exporting our game to iOS and Android, I was a bit disconcerted that it was around 100MB...and it's just a jumping game! I tried to pare down all the graphical assets to be as light and as undemanding as possible; but ultimately, a good chunk of that was overhead.
There were instructions on how to strip away all the 3D parts of the engine and just recompile...but I chickened out. Not confident enough at the moment but I'm learning. I might try doing that when we push the next update.
Yes, the continued abstractions take away performance and filter or corrupt the software often of no fault of the game designer. It is unfortunate, Jonathan Blow's video is amazing and he does streams on twitch, I remember they asked him what he thought of the M1, his response was that we can make programs 100x faster today but nobody wants to program it, and the video talks about we trade time to program for lower performance and ease of use. Remember the times when games shipped completed, and now you expect it to take a year to update and it constantly does so on consoles? Every game is an early release now.
Tell me what you think of the video, I think its very relevant.
One interesting note was that TempleOS which is called a religious OS had a Commadore64 structure and it was apparently easy to make games on it. You mentioned learning unity, the old game programmers would make ISA games that had no OS overhead, ran on all hardware that supported the instructions which happens less when the engines are abstractions that are designed to run on more abstractions like the OS, which of course costs performance, has more bugs, and basically filters your intentions, as well as every version of the engine, OS and other factors a game developer can't control will degrade their software through no fault of their own.
Check out this game made on TempleOS. https://scumgames.neocities.org/blazeitfgt.html