this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Of course nobody want to optimize. Its boring. It messes up the code. Often reqires one to cheat the player with illusions. And its difficult. Not something just any junior developer can be put to work on.
You'd expect that when Raytracing/Pathtracing and the products that drive it have matured enough to be mainstream, devs will have more time for that.
Just place your light source and the tech does the rest. It's crazy how much less work that is.
But we all know the Publishers and shareholders will force them to use that time differently.
Eh, in my experience that's not how development works. With every new tool to improve efficiency, the result is just more features rather than using your new found time to improve your code base.
It's not just from the publishers and shareholders either. Fixing technicial debt issues is hard, and the solutions often need a lot of time for retrospection. It's far easier to add a crappy new feature ontop and call it a day. It's the lower effort thing to do for everyone, management and the low down programmers alike.
New features is what sells a product, so not far from my original point, I'd say.
Definitely a bit of both, and improving code is never the highest priority, yeah.
Who are you directing the comments to? The dev company or individuals? I disagree in the latter. On the former I still think it's a mischaracterizatuon of the situation. If the choice is to spend budget in scope and graphics at the expense of optimization that doesn't seem a hard choice to make.
I might have generalized a bit too much. Of course some individual devs love the challenge of getting better performance out of anything.
But not enough of them that every dev company has an army of good developers who know how to do this with the expertise they are needing performance for. Theres a lot of ways one dev can specialize: gpu api (directx/opengl/vulcan/etc), os, game engine, disk access, database queries. One who knows graphic api well might not know how to optimize database queries. It doesnt help throwing money at the problem either, those who know this stuff usually already have good jobs. So you might have no choice than to use the devs you have, and the money you have budgeted, to release the game within contracted time.