Re: Software Architecture/Design

I've been writing games professionally for almost 18 years now.  
Performance is as important as it's ever been - nobody wants or likes 
playing a sluggish game, but people will play a sluggish game if they 
want/have to.  (And there are plenty of sluggish games out there - 
perhaps not in console land but on the PC they're a dime a dozen.  
Although even the Xbox 360 TCRs only require 15fps.)

While performance is as important as ever, what has changed over the 
years is the attitude programmers have.  Far fewer programmers these 
days care about performance than did 20 years ago.  Back then you had to 
care - hardware was far more limiting then than it is now, and people 
hung on to assembler much more - although most had made the switch to C 
by then, and the progressive types were evangelising the marvellous 
possibilities that C++ would bring (but beware all the performance traps 
of constructors and virtual functions).

These days you get games where most logic is written in a scripting 
language.  Do game coders care about performance?  They might do, but 
not to the same degree they once did.  More likely they're worrying 
about getting all the game play features in on time.  As Brandon says 
you will get your core systems like your math library written early 
targeting SSE, Altivec, or whatever and then you forget about them.  
Large scale optimisation is something happens for the last couple of 
months when everything comes together and management finally realise it 
runs like a shiny, three-legged dog.

And yes, far too many people believe performance is somebody else's 
problem.  I've worked places where management have actively told asset 
producers not to worry about texture size or triangle counts because 
it'll all be fixed in code - which it wasn't, unsurprisingly.



Tony Albrecht wrote:
>
>
> On 11 June 2010 12:45, Brandon Van Every <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 9:46 PM, Shaun Stamper
>     <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>
>         Sure, technology moves on, but we still have to fit everything
>         into a 30hz frame. That update and render within 33ms. Unless
>         you're aiming for 60Hz, then you have much much less. Thats
>         not a lot of time to do anything, let alone many things.
>
>
>     Every year it's less of a problem.  
>
>
> Nonsense. I've been writing games professionally for 10 years now and 
> performance is as much of an issue as it was when I started. The more 
> grunt computers get, the more we want to do with them.
>
> -Tony
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