Re: Software Architecture/Design

Of course most optimisation is done last.  That wasn't my point.  My 
point was that more coders these days expect someone else to optimise 
their efforts and that writing efficient code is somehow, magically, not 
their responsibility any more.  Moving more and more game logic into 
scripts really isn't going to help there, but that's the direction the 
vast majority of studios have taken.  (And why is that?  Designers and 
scripters are cheaper than coders, of course.)

Sure, you had limitations that you couldn't avoid.  Looking at the 
source textures for the next large-scale MMOG we're releasing there's 
19GB of data there already, and that's just textures.  In my mind that's 
unacceptably large, but I don't get a say in that though, I am just left 
holding the shit-stick to help clean the fans.



Jon Frisby wrote:
> On Jun 11, 2010, at 2:41 AM, James Robertson wrote:
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> Has it ever occurred to you that this is the right place for it in the development cycle?
>
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> When I built "When Orcs Attack", my impression was that the casual games industry was religiously tied to a 15MB download size.  That their data suggested a huge falloff in downloads above that.  Fortunately the tool I was using made it easy for me to adjust the size of any given texture asset -- regardless of original size it would downsample it to any power of two I wanted.  (And of course if the quality sucked I could use PhotoShop to scale it down at better quality...)
>
> My first publishing deal involved a suggested download size of 5MB -- I was able to tweak it down to 7MB which was adequate to avoid tanking that deal.  My next publishing deal wanted it to be BIGGER and higher quality because of the expectations of the audience.  That one wound up being 45MB or so.
>
> Sure am glad I didn't tell my artist to make the textures with a 15MB cap in mind because scaling them down was a hell of a lot easier -- and cheaper -- then having to redesign them at a higher resolution.
>
> -JF
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