Become a sponsor to Andrew Aye
I have worked in the game industry since 2001. I have worked on the "Unreal Warfare" engine (2001), Serious Sam engine, Unity, UE3-4 and mostly proprietary engines (including Call of Duty, Infinity Ward). I lead the creation of a new engine at Obsidian Entertainment.
In my second job, I handwrote floating-point code for the PS2 to optimize collision and physics. Once again (gotta love Sony), I refactored the entire VFX system for CoD: MW3 and ported it entirely to SPUs, including some handwritten SPU assembly. For the longest time, I felt that this focus on performance was no longer needed. The capability of the hardware (even on consoles) had reached a point where it was no longer worth the time to spend and diligence writing performance-orientated implementations. Amdahl's law (always generally true across all hardware generations, but the expectation for the average performance changed over the years) meant that you could let the engineers go ahead and code to maximize their efficiency (reduce cost) and then later do a performance pass.
When working on the HoloLens prototype, I realized that I had been mistaken or not patient enough. Consoles had most definitely hit that point of inflection. But human ingenuity showed me that we would constantly look to miniaturize hardware further and use it in new devices. One of our most significant issues on the HoloLens would be the heat generated on the device when running at full throttle (which sat right beside the wearer's temple). We again needed an engine product optimized for a different goal, in this case, wattage expended (which is performance).
Most engine products focus on reducing the effort to create content. This was driven by the fact that high-end content was the area that saw explosive growth (and cost). For my engine project, I felt it would be interesting instead to go old school and focus on clarity of execution (making it easier for people to understand how things are working when doing a code review) and on performance (as measured by power/wattage consumed).
As an engine coder for most of my career, the most profound satisfaction we get is seeing other people leverage our work to make great products and games. Look forward to bringing the code base to an alpha-level stage so that people can provide feedback and even potentially use it for their own learning and creations.