Are performances still important in game programming?

General Discussions
#21

Financially Linux was a complete waste of time for us until the Humble Indie Bundle #2 - we made peanuts, got lots of support issues from people with whacky distros (tip: the only Linux we can really support is Ubuntu 10). We make a small amount of money from Linux since then but nothing that’d support us for even a single day a year. We still plod on with it though just because we can. I look forward to a Steam Linux client. Or Desura, which I understand is in the works.

Ultratron, Droid Assault and Titan Attacks are tiny little games, just a few megs and maybe 2000 sprites per frame max. Revenge is at least 4 times as big in every way. Probably long loading times are due to a combination of crappy slow old hard disk and the fact we use the server VM. It starts up a bit slower but then it does run about 20% faster. Also: if you’ve got less than about 350mb of free physical RAM before starting the game expect it to be utterly slow as it pages out other stuff to make room.

Cas :slight_smile:

#22

Whether performance is important or not highly depends on the kind of game you’re making…

In my most recent game performance was one of the things I had most in focus and have spend most time on.
In fact it started out after a found a very efficient way to solve a certain problem. :slight_smile:

Games like Tetris probably don’t have the same constraints,
and whatever constraints they might have are probably due to the graphics,
which I find to be a kinda superficial area of these games.

In regard to developers ignoring performance, I think every developer sooner or later will be faced with the problem of cutting away certain potential users, be it due to game play design choices or performance requirements. It is not something we want to do, but something we’ll simply be forced to…

I guess in some way, you could say that focusing on lower end systems is like starting a political party oriented towards people that remember a certain event. Eventually this kind of audience will fade away. And what is a developer without audience? :smiley:

  • Scarzzurs
#23

I agree with you. It is more important in a first person shooter than in a Tetris-like game.

In such a case, I prefer disabling some features rather than implementing a feature which would reduce my audience and noticeably increase the hardware requirements. If my source code is modular, why not?

I see what you mean, it is an excellent comparison. However, when my game can do much more things with less resources, it is better for everyone including those with high end machines.

When I began working on my main project, I had an extremely low audience, I received even several threats and insults. I am my own audience in such hard times because I believe what I do is fair.

#24

[quote=“princec,post:21,topic:37005”]
Can you be more precise? For example, Java works really fine on Mageia but OpenJDK is installed by default and without icedtea-web which means that there is no applet & Web Start support until the user installs its RPM :clue: Mandriva uses rather Oracle JRE 1.6.

I test my own game on several Linux distros, the biggest problem I had came from AWT & KDE 4 as I said. Sometimes OpenAL does not work as expected but you use OpenALSoft, you’re not concerned, and you don’t use AWT as far as I know. The main difference is that my game requires Java 1.6 almost since the beginning.