Why do some video game and computer program graphical options have to be “applied” manually while others change the instant you change the setting?
In: Technology
It actually applies to a lot of design of both software and hardware. You’ll have some initialization you do on startup. As a designer/engineer/developer, the least amount of additional work needed to support modifying a setting is to just re-run that initialization process. As an added bonus, it’s less likely to introduce a bug, since that single initialization process can be tested more thoroughly.
Now, if you want to change individual settings and apply them individually, you have to break that initialization up into different sections. You have to pull out all the error checking/handling, all the consistency checks, etc. The amount of development goes up.
In short, it’s easier to check and apply everything at once. But the user experience is better if you can do things individually and see the results immediately. So there’s a tradeoff.
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