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Comment on Saying that hardware price increase is good cause it forces the devs to optimize is not as good as it seems.

Modern developers simply were not ever taught the old ways. The old ways are light years ahead in terms of optimization and efficiency than what modern developers can even imagine. Imagine creating a C compiler and it has to run in 16KB of RAM and be powerful enough to build unxz, untar and sha256sum. Because it was done because they needed it.

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tomalley8342@lemmy.world ⁨56⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
Do you have an example or a snippet in mind for a piece of modern game engine code that would have been done better in the “old ways”?

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goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They also aren’t given enough time to even do optimization

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ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They’re also not really comparable. Teams were so small and project timelines were so short that you often knew exactly what the end would look like. My favorite optimization story from 20+ years ago is that a dev (who went nameless, and so did the game, as the story was posted anonymously) made a habit of declaring a large empty variable at the beginning of a project, and that variable’s only job was to be deleted when they encroached on their memory budget so they knew when to stop.

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CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That someone thought Electron was a not just a reasonable approach but a good idea, when it sucks down a gig of RAM for what amounts to mIRC with GIFs, is a strong support of your claim.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Optimizing for development time is a worthy pursuit as well.
  
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  - ormith@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Maybe developers could use that oh-so-amazing AI to optimize then…
    
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- panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  They pay for dev time, the extra energy costs and worse experience to the user are t in their budget.
  
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panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They all work for big companies, and in big companies you get paid for features not for fixes.

AAA games will never be optimized. They’re too big to care, and nobody is accountable for it.

This is why I quit big companies. I love optimizing. I love building flexible software, that’s fast, clean, and simple. But that takes time and you won’t get it, you’ll get “what’s the minimum we can do to get this feature out” or “we can always come back to that” and it’s back logged forever. If someone else pushes out a hacky MVP of spaghetti code that gets to market faster, they’ll go with that, even if it costs months of dedicated fixes.

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