what is video game optimisation and how does it get done well or badly?

Question

what is video game optimisation and how does it get done well or badly?

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Answer 1

Games are Software.

When making software, you use API (Application Programming Interface).

API’s are like waiters in a restaurant.

* You tell them what you want (Input)
* They process your order (Operation)
* They bring you the items you ordered (Output)

You don’t know how the Operation is done, you only know the Inputs and Output. If you’re a restaurant owner or a chef, you probably have an idea how the operation works, but you can only guess unless you have access to the kitchen.

Not all items in the menu can be done quickly, not all restaurants have the same speed and quality to delivery the items. If you want the perfect food, you do it yourself according to your own liking (Specification). But now think about it, you can create the perfect food, but can you scale it? Can you produce the perfect item on demand? Another problem, you perfected one food, but how about something else?

Restaurants can try optimize their Operations to have maximum quality and speed, but surely, you know that they can easily mess it up from some simple mistake. The more you optimize the system, the less resilient it becomes to Special Cases (bugs and glitches).

Games and Software are built on top of APIs on top APIs on top of other APIs, like a restaurant cooking for another restaurant to be served to another restaurant, and so on.

Sometimes, developers want to make their own APIs so that they know the Operation is doing exactly as per specification. The problem is you can’t get good at everything. So you go back to step 1 and just use an API that you have very high confidence that it does one and only one thing really really well.

For those engineers who really want to build their own APIs so that it can be well “optimized”, it’s futile to optimize while protecting from every case of bugs and glitch that can happen in the app. So they have to compromise, and a lot of times, the compromise is not to optimize but to make the app resilient instead.

So sometimes, optimization does not mean speed of output, but rather making consistent predictable high quality outputs. It’s better to output 5 dishes per 10 mins than 10 dishes per 5 mins but all the dishes are disgustingly bad and the kitchen is burning.