size/speed gluttons?

...that was me.

~ There''s no substitute for failure ~

In college we discussed a principle of data structures and algorithms that basically said that most performance problems in computer software can not be adequately solved by adding more resources (CPU power, RAM, etc) to the task. The solution lies in optimization of algorithms. This basically says that bad programmer''s games will always be slow (taking into account the increase in sophistication) because they will rely upon hardware to make their game run better. And yes, even video hardware as its limitations.

The best example of this theory involves mathematical computation. If you were to do some major physics simulations you''d find that if you were to not use special approximation techniques, no matter what speed your processor is your simulation will still take several hours. I saw this happen with my friend who was doing the most ridiculous computations when he could have been using lookup tables, approximations, and calculations at integer values rather than microscopic floating point calculations.


RandomTask

It''s quite difficult because there is usually a trade-off between speed and size. Storing more data means that less has to be calculated at real time. Storing bigger textures means less graphics operations at runtime etc. etc.

I find it amazing that to download a single level demo of a game is 70MB! I mean, the executable is probably a meg or two, a couple of MP3 tracks (hopefully) would be a few more MB, which means there is a hell of a lot of graphics and meta information for the game.

Can it really be optimised that much? We''re not talking about simple platforms games after all. The complexity of something like Unreal or Quake3 is bound to push up the requirement of PC''s?

i understand that there are tradeoffs between size and speed sometimes, but that was not my point. it was simply that people dont want to think a little harder to make their game either faster or smaller; they push that responsibility off on the players machine for the fact that "computers are fast enough now we dont have to worry about optimization".

- jeremiah
http://fakemind.com

I agree for the most part, but it''s also more important to put code robustness and clearness a bit ahead of speed. Speed certainly is important, but nobody will care if you have the fastest engine ever if it crashes every other minute and nobody can figure out how to change it .

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AIM: IanWinsAgain ICQ: 60635592 TIM: FaceHat
FaceHat Software -- Wear the hat.

I''ve seen alot of c++ abuse..some people would rather have nice "looking" code that goes through 10 layers of abstraction rather than efficiently break the problem down into a series of discrete calculations..

bear in mind I''m not talking about proper c++ usage, I''m talking about those guys that can''t add 2 numbers together without having a special class to handle it..

"Like all good things, it starts with a monkey.."