I feel like “optimization” gets thrown around as a buzz word when talking about supposed unnecessarily large game sizes, like the upcoming Mortal Kombat. But what does it actually mean for a game to be optimized? Or how can it be done?
In: 0
Back in the day, when we wore onions on our belts as was the style at the time, memory and processing speed were extremely limited and you had to do things like load your drivers in a specific order to ensure there was enough left over to run the actual game. This also required developers to keep their codes lean and clean to ensure the average consumer could run it.
As memory, processing power, and hard disk space have increased by orders of magnitude, such optimization has become less necessary and many developers care less about keeping things slim because it’s no longer strictly necessary. Plus things had to fit on floppy disks and later CD-ROMs, now you can download anything without really worrying about how big it is. Bloated software might cause the download to take 2 hours instead of 1, or cause frame rates to drop occasionally, but they won’t generally cause the game to literally not run.
As far as how it’s done, it varies, but at the core is about minimizing lines of code and/or ensuring only the ones necessary in a given situation are actually processed.
Latest Answers