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

Question

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. “*

In: 404

Answer 1

Games Developer and Software Engineer here:

Basically there are loads of ways to do things, and often the quickest way isn’t the most efficient.
For an example, imagine I have a thousand icons on my screen.
A thousand different pictures of different things, and I need them all to appear seamlessly at the same time.

Seems like a no-brainer, I’m going to have to tell the computer to fetch all 1000 separate images from a folder and display them, which is going to take a moment.

Except.. that’s not the only option. We can do something called a Sprite-Sheet.
Basically we just put all 1000 icons on one big image, and fetch that one image. Which is much much faster than a thousand separate requests.

Then we can simply display the parts of that image that we want, because we can easily store the position and size of the part of the big image that corresponds to each smaller icon.

This is far far more efficient than doing it on an individual basis, but obviously is a bit more complex to set up, so it might well be set aside by a lazy developer.