If people say a game is poorly optimized, what do they mean? And how do you “optimize” a game?

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Edit: Really enjoy threads like this, because you learn and see so many Pov.

My favourite answer (not in this thread unfortunately) was:

*”If you write a story, the number of words you use can affect the reader’s experience.*

*Use too many words, and the reader takes a long time to get through the book, has difficulty remembering everything, and can’t separate what’s important and what’s not.*

*But use too few words and the reader will get an incomplete picture, make mistakes in understanding the story, and eventually become disinvested in the book.*

*A poorly optimized game is like one of these examples. Either too much goes in, making it difficult for the hardware to cope, or not enough goes in, making the game buggy and broken. (Sometimes both, but that’s beyond ELI5).*

*When it comes to optimising a reader’s experience, it is not about putting more or less words in but choosing the right combination of the right words at the correct time in the plot. Optimising a game is similar concept.*

*Most importantly, no matter how well you write a book, there are always people who will think it could’ve been written better, especially by them. “*

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Only so many things can be loaded at the same time. There are many ways to accomplish this. A lot of games only render things within a certain distance of the player or even better, only if the player is looking at them. Things farther away can be blurrier and objects can be hollow. You can individually load cities and houses when you walk into them. A million ways to do it. If you just load everything at once and don’t use tricks, the game is poorly optimized.

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