Comment by kshri24
17 hours ago
Game development is STILL a highly underrated field. Plenty of advancements/optimizations (both in software/hardware) can be directly traced back to game development. Hopefully, with RAM prices shooting up the way it is, we go back to keeping optimizations front and center and reduce all the bloat that has accumulated industry wide.
A number of my tricks are stolen from game devs and applied to boring software. Most notably, resource budgets for each task. You can’t make a whole system fast if you’re spending 20% of your reasonable execution time on one moderately useful aspect of the overall operation.
I think one could even say gaming as a sector single handedly move most of the personal computing platform forward since 80s and 90s. Before that it was probably Military and cooperate. From DOS era, overclocking CPU to push benchmarks, DOOM, 3D Graphics API from 3DFx Glide to Direct X. Faster HDD for faster Gaming Load times. And for 10 - 15 years it was gaming that carried CUDA forward.
Yes please! Stop making me download 100+gb patches!
The large file sizes are not because of bloat per-se...
It's a technique which supposedly helped at one point in time to reduce loading times, helldiver's being the most note-able example of removing this "optimization".
However, this is by design - specifically as an optimization. Can't really be calling that boat in the parents context of inefficient resource usage
This was the the reason in Helldivers, other games have different reasons - like uncompressed audio (which IIRC was the reason for the CoD-install-size drama a couple of years back) - the underlying reason is always the same though, the dev team not caring about asset size (or more likely: they would like to take care of it but are drowned in higher priority tasks).
We aren't talking about the initial downloads though. We are talking about updates. I am like 80% sure you should be able to send what changed without sending the whole game as if you were downloading it for the first time.
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Do you have some resource for people outside this field to understand what it's about?
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