How does game “optimization” work? Are people sitting there changing lines of code to more “optimal” ones? What is “optimized”?

Question

The recent The Last of Us for PC made me realize I had no idea what’s meant by “optimizing” a game.

Same with optifine in Minecraft improving performance. How do these things work to just make games use fewer resources?

In: 158

Answer 1

Game engines can do pretty amazing things. However if they aren’t optimised properly they can ruin a game. From a Level Designers point of view. Levels are full of geometry. Some factors that impact on performance are the number of triangles (Tris), Drawcells, Shadowcells, LOD, number of Entities (things that do stuff like doors and bots) and Vis Portals.

These things need to be optimised. One way to reduce Tris is to have the engine only draw things the player can actually see. Vis Portals control this. This video will explain this. This is the game The Dark Mod. More modern games are much more refined methods.