18-04-2008, 11:19 PM
seraphelic Wrote:Who says a fast game is buggy, non-functional, incomplete? LOL I know my engine isnt blting everything properly atm but I'm not going to release it buggy. Also I think it's better to work on the engine itself before releasing it with good gfx, so you don't have to release as many patches and updates.
Actually its the whole concept of premature optimizing. Optimizing generally (definitely not always) increases complexity, whether it is code complexity, format complexity (binary files vs ini files or a database), dependency complexity (ie removing dependencies from objects to reduce reference type instance overhead, which could result in making it more difficult to find your way from one object to another later), etc. This just leads to more difficult designing from that point on. Optimizing is not a free process, either - it takes time. If you increase code complexity, development time increases even if the time spent optimizing remains a constant in comparison if you optimized last. Also, since optimizing is generally cutting out operations or replacing operations with faster counter-parts, it is expected that code could change its resulting value and thus potentially cause bugs.
The only way you could possibly, logically, create a program faster (in terms of development time) if you optimize it than if you don't is if you are refactoring while you optimize. But refactoring is something you should do while developing. In fact, probably should spend quite a lot of time doing it for any project of a decent size.
So, whats my point? I never said fast code is buggy, but all logic points to that if you spend time optimizing, the same features will take longer than if you do not optimize. Its best if you optimize when you need the better performance. Does your game bog down at 30 connections? Well, if you don't ever have 30 people playing at once, who cares? Spending your time focusing on supporting more people instead of giving people a reason to play will result in you having no one playing your game that can support hundreds of connections.
Of course optimizing is great. The faster something runs, the better. But when your time could be spent doing something more important, you should be doing that which is more important. Optimize your time, not your code. :wink: