The implication is that you avoid self implication.
So you're telling me, if you are ever wrongfully arrested or detained, you are going to be dimwitted enough to talk freely to the cops like they're your good buddies? Because it sounds like you are just that dimwitted and naive.
Absolutely. I've seen the Shenmue video and it's stunning. It's more impressive than anything that launched on the PS1 or N64.
>I sometimes wonder what could have been had Sega released proper documentation and a decent dev kit earlier
That is a complaint I have heard a lot, and it is valid. But ultimately I think Sega shot itself in the face by even having a second CPU. Concurrency is a hard problem, and certainly game devs back in the mid 90s were not up to the task of utilizing a second CPU. They had enough on their hands with transitioning from 2D to 3D already. I have read that most games developed on the Saturn only used one CPU.
Choosing quads over polygons was also a major blunder of the Saturn's design. The list of Sega's mistakes with the Saturn is so lengthy that it's impossible to think it had any chance of succeeding.
But I still play mine. :)
The sad thing is while Sega did everything wrong with the Saturn, they did everything /right/ with the Dreamcast and it still failed miserably. I kind of think of them as the Commodore of the games industry. Technology that was ahead of the curve, awesome products, but ruined by terrible management and stomped out by juggernauts (MS Windows, Sony Playstation).
> Former IGDA member, Gamasutra subscriber and GDCE attendee here, hence why I asked for numbers.
Maybe "former" is why. There are no numbers published to confirm or deny. It's apparent if you keep up with the community and ask developers what they use.
> It is not, but the goal of fitting as much code as possible in small packages is.
You're really talking about reducing sizes of assets & included libs. That has more to do with optimizing DL time than hardware performance, and nothing to do with low level coding where you're writing machine instructions without touching a higher level of abstraction. Not the same at all.
> I am quite sure there are other contenders like home grown engines, LibGDX, Marmalade, Cocos (all variants), SDL, MonoGame, DirectXTK, Project Anarchy , Apple own Scenekit and SpriteKit,...
It doesn't matter how many frameworks are out there. If you hang around the game dev scene long enough, you'll see that most small devs are using Unity, and if not that, Cocos2DX. Just head over to Gamasutra, /r/gamedev, or browse Steam & itch.io and see the # of cross platform mobile ports. Talk to devs, they are using Unity.
> Why do you think then all major OS vendors are teaching the devs how to reduce their packages sizes?
Reducing package size isn't really comparable to writing portions of your game in assembler. I don't consider that low level coding or pushing hardware limits.
Pretty awesome. Goes to show the great lengths taken even on state of the art hardware at the time.
And the PS1 wasn't even the worst of it. The Sega Saturn and N64 were both considerably more difficult to develop for. And the PC market was terribly fragmented and had a high rate of obsolescence.
Not so sure about this. Most mobile games are developed with Unity. And what appear to be the cutting edge titles are usually using the Unreal engine. There's not much "to the metal" coding going on.
Besides, most mobile games are being played by the casual crowd. Games don't need graphics that push hardware limits to sell.