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
Poorly optimized means that the software is wasting time or resources somewhere.
Optimization is looking for these slow downs / wasted resources and improving them.
Say we are working on a large open world game, you and I are level designers. We each need a table for our part of the world. So we go to our graphic designer and get a table model, he gives us the same model hes been working on, and we put it into the game.
This is poorly optimized. We’ve both added the same asset in two places, so we are loading it twice. There are two identical tables being loaded. Instead we should add the asset once and then both reference that single asset.
While a single mistake like this wouldn’t directly affect performance greatly, repeatedly doing it could.
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