I'm mostly confused why the author bothered to do this. Age1 ran on computers that were, quite literally, one to two orders of magnitude slower than the ones th

I'm mostly confused why the author bothered to do this. Age1 ran on computers that were, quite literally, one to two orders of magnitude slower than the ones this remake will run on, and as far as I remember nobody complained about performance issues. So why spend time (when the author argues they were time constrained) optimizing this part of the game for speed in particular? I can totally understand the need for a rewrite given all else the author writes about the algorithm, but the focus on speed as the first-line item is kind of confusing.