[alexvitkov]

A full memory dump for a game will nowadays often be multiple gigabytes, that's a non-starter.

Even back in the day, Game Maker had a function to dump the state to disk that was intended for game saves. It sucked - turns out there's a bunch of state that you don't want in your savefile - keybinds, settings, even most game state actually.

Save state should be opt-in, not opt-out, and on top of that a VM/memory dump makes it a very big pain to opt-out.

[interroboink]

All valid issues, to be sure. But I do think that a big chunk of the suckiness is poor tooling (lacking easier/better ways to opt-out or customize various parts, for instance) rather than a conceptual problem. That's why I feel like it would require a language to fully embrace it (kinda like Smalltalk did) rather than being a bolt-on feature. And for games it would likely need to be innately aware of GPU concerns, too.

On the flipside, there are (hopefully obvious) big advantages for the development process, when you can snapshot full states.

Of course, none of it matters if you actually need max performance — no AAA shooters would use it. But there are lots of not-performance-critical games which might benefit more from the better development experience at the expense of some performance. Perhaps point-and-click adventures, sidescrollers, shootemups, and such.

Anyway, just spitballing (:

I'm working on a game now that has almost no state, and I wish for a way to have that same freedom I feel in a more stateful traditional game, without having to muddy up everything with serialization interfaces et. al.