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Game programmers have long been the producers of the most impressive applied computer science. The film Shrek 3 (2007) took 20 million CPU hours of render time
by mrkeen 12d ago
Game programmers have long been the producers of the most impressive applied computer science.
The film Shrek 3 (2007) took 20 million CPU hours of render time. Games push 60 frames a second. For a visual comparison, check Call of Duty world at war (2008).
Also compare to browsers, which can sometimes scroll smoothly through some styled rectangles and text, and consume gigabytes of ram if you have a few tabs open.
Games have directional sound effects and soundtracks. Don't need 800 Spotify engineers to pull that off.
Multiplayer games solve crazy distributed system problems, making it feel like 'now' when players shoot each other, even with historical latencies of 100-200ms.
AI (in terms of LLMs) seems to be a continuation of that. You used to be able to play 7 AIs on 1998 hardware, at a distinctly "non-beginner level".
- TeMPOraL 12d agoGame developers cheat like there's no tomorrow, though. In the videogame 3D graphics space, the old mantra was, "if it looks right, it's right". That barrel you shoot, is really half a barrel when you're up close, a flat rectangle when you're far, a point-with-mass + a vector for purposes of physics, and not even there for purposes of AI because pathfinding uses a precomputed graph of nodes that's carefully aligned with the map so you don't notice the enemies can noclip through everything other than floors and walls. Etc. And yes, many games would have scripted enemies or other events come out at you so you don't linger in particular areas too long, lest you spot some of the shortcuts they made. I grew up wanting to make games, spent my teenage years in hobbyist gamedev communities, and to date, this remains to me the most enjoyable and pure form of exercising software development skills.