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

Running everything in a game properly is really slow, so once you know what your game is like, you start adding shortcuts.

A really simple one is Frustum Culling, basically “Don’t draw things the player isn’t looking at”, sounds simple right? But figuring out what’s in the players line of sight is challenge in itself, and what if you want to increase the player’s Field of View later? You’ll need to change all your calculations.

What if you’re making a zombie horde game, and you can make the zombie movement calculations faster by going “Well a zombie is always between 1.5m and 2m tall”, but then Steve from marketing says he’s done a deal with Crunchyroll for an Attack on Titan tie-in and can you put in some really big zombies?

Generally you want to do these steps later in development, in case you change something that ruins your assumptions, but then the game needs to hit its release date and there’s no time. It is joked that the two rules of optimisation are “Don’t do it” and (for experts) “Don’t do it *yet*”.