Re: Software Architecture/Design

On Jun 10, 2010, at 11:29 PM, Tony Albrecht wrote:

> 
> 
> On 11 June 2010 13:46, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
> 
> Isn't that the point of this entire thread (or am I getting my threads mixed up)? Optimising code that is put together in a way that only considers ease of implementation can be incredibly difficult to optimise and may require nasty hacks which can make the codebase brittle. If you could just design your system upfront with some consideration of the underlying HW you'll get better performance - note that this is not necessarily exclusive of any of the features that you want in your code base like extensibility, or readability.

I'm using "features" here in the sense of game design, not code design.

There's overlap of threads here, but the reality is that it's not as black-or-white as people want it to be.  Yes, in the particular and immediate circumstances of, say, a console developer, performance is an overriding concern but the simple fact is we're having a discussion about 'better' structural techniques -- not one about writing our code to match cycle-for-cycle the scan-rate of the video hardware in order to avoid missing a deadline (or whatever -- I have a friend who grew up in that world, but I was not there myself).  Back in the day, performance was such an overriding concern that you did everything in ASM  and even C was a controversial choice.

A lot of people on this list seem to be so myopic that they are unable to recognize how much their present situation -- and argument -- parallel those made in the past.

-JF

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