3 ms·

"I argue a lot for craftsmanship-for-craftsmanship’s-sake, and I realize how that usually doesn’t make financial sense, but in this case a little attention and

"I argue a lot for craftsmanship-for-craftsmanship’s-sake, and I realize how that usually doesn’t make financial sense, but in this case a little attention and care could have saved the publisher millions of dollars in actual costs, and only god-knows-how-much in reputation and goodwill. Sloppy engineering has a cost, good craftsmanship has actual value, and the next time someone is allowed to ship something this terrible we might not be lucky enough to be able to develop such a fix."

KronisLV 5y ago
Do you think that people in charge of shipping the product know about this (i.e. management)? What about the typical role focused teams - whose role would low level optimization be? Do you think that optimization was a separate epic or a number of backlog items? Would the team that implements the game code even get that much direct help and support from the people who developed the engine tech? Maybe i'm wrong about these particular ideas, but to me it seems that there is something wrong in the industry, where slow software is routinely shipped (e.g. Electron apps and lots of Wirth's Law in practice) and where the exact same extends to games, for example, how Cyberpunk 2077 was at release. What can we do to solve this, as developers? Can developers even fix this and possibly provide the necessary pushback or something else? Should someone else fix this, maybe at a different level of the org chart? In contrast, here's a positive example: Visual Studio Code. It's built on Electron, yet somehow feels far more snappy than the likes of Brackets or Atom. It doesn't feel an order of magnitude or two slower than the likes of Sublime or Notepad++ at this point! What is Microsoft doing differently in this regard? Prioritizing performance? Throwing resources at the problem, in the forms of specialized optimization teams and commitments to this? How much does that cost them?

KronisLV 5y ago

Do you think that people in charge of shipping the product know about this (i.e. management)? What about the typical role focused teams - whose role would low level optimization be? Do you think that optimization was a separate epic or a number of backlog items? Would the team that implements the game code even get that much direct help and support from the people who developed the engine tech? Maybe i'm wrong about these particular ideas, but to me it seems that there is something wrong in the industry, where slow software is routinely shipped (e.g. Electron apps and lots of Wirth's Law in practice) and where the exact same extends to games, for example, how Cyberpunk 2077 was at release. What can we do to solve this, as developers? Can developers even fix this and possibly provide the necessary pushback or something else? Should someone else fix this, maybe at a different level of the org chart? In contrast, here's a positive example: Visual Studio Code. It's built on Electron, yet somehow feels far more snappy than the likes of Brackets or Atom. It doesn't feel an order of magnitude or two slower than the likes of Sublime or Notepad++ at this point! What is Microsoft doing differently in this regard? Prioritizing performance? Throwing resources at the problem, in the forms of specialized optimization teams and commitments to this? How much does that cost them?