You can see this kind of design in action in the Source engine, perhaps inherited from Quake (which is partly Carmack's work of course). There are hard limits o

You can see this kind of design in action in the Source engine, perhaps inherited from Quake (which is partly Carmack's work of course). There are hard limits on things like how many objects can exist at once. Occasionally those get hit… usually due to a memory leak![0] So the artificial limit helps find real problems. That's also been my experience with PHP, which limits the amount of memory a request or script execution can consume by default. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw2X1yhrDdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw2X1yhrDdE — check out shounic's other videos too, there's lots of interesting content there about how complex game systems fail, including about these limits