3 ms·

It is this type of analytics and discipline that I love about the PG team. It takes a lot of dedication and patience to do, but I wish more software teams did

by MR4D 4y ago

It is this type of analytics and discipline that I love about the PG team. It takes a lot of dedication and patience to do, but I wish more software teams did this. Perhaps schools should put more emphasis on this type of analysis. Maybe then Call of Duty would load in a reasonable time. (sorry, pet peeve of mine)

maccard 4y ago
I work in video games and have done my fair share of perf work. Pretty much every game does this kind of work, and all the live service games have had a full team dedicated to ongoing performance work. I could easily sit and throw shade that Twitter takes longer to show my timeline than most ps5 games do to boot up and load into game, but that doesn't help anyone.
- MR4D 4y ago
  You make a good point, and I am aware of that. Frankly, the engineering that goes into any FPS (even the bad ones) is beyond amazing, especially when you add networking latencies to the complexity. I should have chosen websites for my rant, but CoD has been on my mind this week due to the weird way you have to keep getting into a game every time and go through what seems like multiple home screens in a way that is either a bug, or just poorly thought out. Either way, it is a weird waste of time, and annoying when you're trying to play two back-to-back games.
- hinkley 4y ago
  It's typical in non-gaming teams to have any instinct to optimize beaten out of you instead of guided. Knuth's comments about premature optimization have been so misquoted at this point that we've gone way beyond people using it as permission not to think, they also use it as a mandate to stop other people from thinking as well. Academics are particularly bad at falling back on aphorisms, so how one would change the curriculum to fix this would also involve changing the teachers, which as an automatic conversation killer. In my case I was keeping my own council before anyone tried to beat it out of me, and I learned to just keep things to myself. On the plus side I know dozens of ways to refactor for legibility and 'accidentally' improve performance at the same time.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    >On the plus side I know dozens of ways to refactor for legibility and 'accidentally' improve performance at the same time. My favorite is "That nested loop is kind of hard to read, how about making a dictionary/hashmap instead?"
    - hinkley 4y ago
      I'll split this operation into a variable so it's easier to debug. Oh, now the variable is defined outside of the loop. How did that happen.
      - touisteur 4y ago
        If your compiler is not doing expression hoisting at -O2 in 2022, we should (collectively) ask for a refund (I know I'd be opening tickets since we pay for compiler support). Of course, very often, doing that often improves readability so it might still be a good use if your time.
- zerocrates 4y ago
  There's also the factor of what kinds of performance you care about and are thinking about, and what you're not. There was the memorable story shared around here a while ago of a player patching GTA V's live service online to eliminate multiple-minute load times [1]. I'm sure Rockstar had/has many people working on performance (the core game is a well-known good performer and now has been on three different console generations since launch) but just, not this. (Though to totally miss such truly extensive load times on your main revenue-generating component, that one's a headscratcher. Feels like something you'd end up addressing just for your own internal sanity. Maybe everyone just had monster workstations and didn't notice.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

by MR4D 4y ago

maccard 4y ago

I work in video games and have done my fair share of perf work. Pretty much every game does this kind of work, and all the live service games have had a full team dedicated to ongoing performance work. I could easily sit and throw shade that Twitter takes longer to show my timeline than most ps5 games do to boot up and load into game, but that doesn't help anyone.

MR4D 4y ago
You make a good point, and I am aware of that. Frankly, the engineering that goes into any FPS (even the bad ones) is beyond amazing, especially when you add networking latencies to the complexity. I should have chosen websites for my rant, but CoD has been on my mind this week due to the weird way you have to keep getting into a game every time and go through what seems like multiple home screens in a way that is either a bug, or just poorly thought out. Either way, it is a weird waste of time, and annoying when you're trying to play two back-to-back games.
hinkley 4y ago
It's typical in non-gaming teams to have any instinct to optimize beaten out of you instead of guided. Knuth's comments about premature optimization have been so misquoted at this point that we've gone way beyond people using it as permission not to think, they also use it as a mandate to stop other people from thinking as well. Academics are particularly bad at falling back on aphorisms, so how one would change the curriculum to fix this would also involve changing the teachers, which as an automatic conversation killer. In my case I was keeping my own council before anyone tried to beat it out of me, and I learned to just keep things to myself. On the plus side I know dozens of ways to refactor for legibility and 'accidentally' improve performance at the same time.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  >On the plus side I know dozens of ways to refactor for legibility and 'accidentally' improve performance at the same time. My favorite is "That nested loop is kind of hard to read, how about making a dictionary/hashmap instead?"
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I'll split this operation into a variable so it's easier to debug. Oh, now the variable is defined outside of the loop. How did that happen.
    - touisteur 4y ago
      If your compiler is not doing expression hoisting at -O2 in 2022, we should (collectively) ask for a refund (I know I'd be opening tickets since we pay for compiler support). Of course, very often, doing that often improves readability so it might still be a good use if your time.
zerocrates 4y ago
There's also the factor of what kinds of performance you care about and are thinking about, and what you're not. There was the memorable story shared around here a while ago of a player patching GTA V's live service online to eliminate multiple-minute load times [1]. I'm sure Rockstar had/has many people working on performance (the core game is a well-known good performer and now has been on three different console generations since launch) but just, not this. (Though to totally miss such truly extensive load times on your main revenue-generating component, that one's a headscratcher. Feels like something you'd end up addressing just for your own internal sanity. Maybe everyone just had monster workstations and didn't notice.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339