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Games are engineered products in heavily constrained environments. General software is more like: clever ways to automate annoying tasks. General software can b
by dcow 7y ago
Games are engineered products in heavily constrained environments. General software is more like: clever ways to automate annoying tasks. General software can be maximally lazy or elegant or both. Games are clever yet practical and efficient. What baffles me is how often I find a game design to be far more elegant than that of common software..
- matheusmoreira 7y ago> General software can be maximally lazy or elegant or both. Games are clever yet practical and efficient. Video games are soft real time applications: performance visibly degrades if the targeted frame rate is not met. Given the hardware of the time, they had to be practical and efficient. This might not be the case anymore. Today we have hardware with incredible performance but some of that speed powers abstractions that make it easier to develop the game. Older games had complete control of the machine but now they are merely one program scheduled to run by the operating system. > What baffles me is how often I find a game design to be far more elegant than that of common software. I think it's because of how little abstraction there is. The data structures we find in the code of older games are directly related to the game itself. It's rare to find a retro game with a separate game engine.