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

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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. “*

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25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s often down to some decisions you make which means having to do less maths. Really simple example – in a 3D game like they all are now, the computer has a 3D model of each character on the screen, but it only needs to do the maths to draw the side facing the camera. If it drew the other side as well, it would be slower. So optimisations are typically ways to do less maths to get a good enough result.

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