Re: Software Architecture/Design

On Jun 10, 2010, at 8:46 PM, Shaun Stamper wrote:

> How many games companies have you worked at that have decided that performance was paramount prior to the game running at 10 frames a second in a release build? Unfortunately, functionality has a tendency to get put above performance, happens all the time.

How many games companies have you worked at who had customers who would happily say "this game is simplistic and boring but I'm happy with it because it runs at 60fps"?

Performance is a prerequisite to a successful game, but it is not a competitive differentiator.  On top of that, it's very easy to know where you stand in terms of the "bottom line" of performance:  You're hitting your 30fps or 60fps -- or you're not.  It's much harder to know if you've got the 'right' functionality for what you believe will make or break your product.  On top of that, much of the work of optimizing things for performance makes functionality 'brittle' / 'rigid' -- hard to change in arbitrary ways.  It removes the ability to incrementally explore and refine ideas, or at least boxes that process in considerably.

THAT is why performance takes a back-seat to functionality, and why an attitude like yours is absolutely terrifying to anyone who's ever put their own money on the line to ship a product.

-JF

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