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

A lot of examples are already given, but lets keep it simple with an example that a 5 year old can follow.

Games use a lot of math in the background, so lets say you have a number, and you need to increase it by 5. An non optimized game would take the number, add 1, take the result, add 1.. etc until it has done this 5 times. That’s 5 calculations. A bit like how you would count on your fingers, one at a time.

An optimization you could do is just take the number, and add 5, that is only one calculation for a computer.

This is oversimplified, but a lot of games do unnecessary loops like this as it is often simpler, and it might work fine in the beginning, but when you add more content to the game it might not work so well anymore. Another example that i’ve seen in real programs is when you have a database, for example all items in the game. To get one item, they request all items from the database and in the code they use only the one they want. This works reasonably fast when you have 10 items in the database, but is very slow if you have 10 million items. An optimization would be to request only that specific item from the database.