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

I can give you a real world example of poor optimisation I encountered on my first games job almost twenty years ago.

We were making a 3D strategy/rpg hybrid and one day QA noticed that our performance had gotten worse and especially in one level, where the game became a slideshow.

It turned out that a junior artist had created a pumpkin model in excruciating detail, modelling every single leaf and bump in it. As you might know 3d models are made out of triangles stitched together. Each on of these triangles needs to be „drawn“ by the graphics card, so especially in the old days, when computers were way less powerful than now, you were always aiming to create objects with as few of those triangles as possible, while still retaining details.

A pumpkin in a strategy game which you usually watch from above can easily be made with a few dozen triangles and still look good.

That particular pumpkin model had over twelve thousand triangles and was placed hundreds of times on the level that had the bad performance, since it featured pumpkin fields and pumpkin merchants…

It was a very easy fix which immediately improved performance. And since this happened during development, no customer ever encountered the pumpkin of doom in the game.