| Cameron MacKinnon 2004-03-27, 12:26 am |
| Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> Cameron MacKinnon wrote:
[color=darkred]
> You are simply incorrect. I would suggest you learn about game industry
> practices if you care. The reality is, computers are pretty fast nowadays,
> and game developers are usually pretty good at separating out the
> performance critical tasks.
Where would you point me to to learn more?
I read the online ACM Queue last month, and that was pretty interesting.
It talked about game companies having to predict likely average
machine performance a year or three in advance, and having multiple
versions depending on the customer's CPU and graphics capability. One
guy was quoted as being disappointed that graphics performance was lower
than he thought we'd have by now, as compared to CPU speed; that
bolsters your assertion.
I was under the impression that games' AI was still on a pretty tight
CPU budget. No? Nowhere did I imply that game programmers were too
stupid to use code profilers, but if you have to limit the cycles given
to your search algorithms to maintain realtime performance, then
everything else is time-critical, in the sense that it steals cycles
from your AI.
Computers were pretty fast when I was a kid, they'll be pretty fast when
I'm dead, but never fast enough. The broad spread between a gamers'
dream machine and the lowly hardware that game publishers spec as
minimum is a challenge as well.
On a related note, for an example of the opposite of Lisp, see
http://www.zeroc.com/ - they do a lightweight CORBA replacement aimed at
MMORPG developers. The manual for it is full of explanations as to why
they don't support features that their customers obviously desire,
likewise with their online forums. I couldn't help thinking that it was
exactly the opposite of (Orbitz, Viaweb, can't remember which) who
copied competitors' features with one day turnaround, and fixed bugs
while the customer was still on the phone. The poor schmos at ZeroC are
quite obviously limited by their language, and their customers suffer
the consequences.
--
Cameron MacKinnon
Toronto, Canada
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