Heyas, thanks for taking the time to read. I hope it helped.
My comment is made in the context of 3d AAA web games specifically with webgl2. I set out to investigate if 3d AAA quality web games were viable a long time ago. How stuff looks nice in tech demos but falter when everything comes together. Seedborn(SB) is where I try to bring everything together. A text elaboration would be very long and not very informative. I think a breakdown ss would be do better from all points.
Fig. 1: Dev stress test scene with simple explanations
Figure 1 shows my goto stress test scene. The 2 pics are of the same scene and while it looks packed, there’s still a lot of undeveloped space. Also, there is a simple post process for color grading. In short, anything that can be instanced/thin instanced are already done. If it needs animations, it will be driven by a VAT. The only exception are the 20 animated characters (due to animation blending), one-off buildings (manor, inventory), terrain, env, water etc. Debug stats are as shown in my previous post.
As you can see, we are still a ways off making anything of AAA quality. I believe primary bottlenecks are largely due to updates of the transformation matrices for skeletons every frame. Even with VATs, the sheer number (40+) still constitute a hurdle. Now compare this with Age of Empire series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn-biVidA4w) or the Civ series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF8Ribe5AFU) both of which contain far more assets. In their heyday, these titles used 2d sprites(!) and that was good enuff. Everytime I want to add a feature now, I have to ask myself how much resources it will consume. As a game dev, you don’t want to deal with device limits. However, as a 3d web game dev, YOU have to deal with web+device limits. Imo, that limits creativity…