Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.

The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.

They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.

The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary.

Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.

Tell me you don't work on game engines without telling me..

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Modern engines are the cumulative result of hundreds of thousands of engine-programmer hours. You're not rewriting Unreal in several years, let alone multiple times in one year. Get a grip dude.

I’d be careful before telling people to “get a grip”.

I thought this post was weird for a few reasons, so I read through your resume, which perfectly explained everything. You're the author of that voxel engine I keep seeing get posted, but you have absolutely no experience in the industry, not even bushleague itch.io stuff. I wouldn't normally call someone out for any of this, but who are you to tell anybody to get grip? You don't even know what you're talking about, which is why your reply is simultaneously naive and a non-sequitur. Chill out. You have a cute toy engine, but it's nothing more than portfolio padding. Until you've actually shipped a real game from start to finish, you've got no room to act like this. A little bit more self awareness please.

That said, it's easy to throw shade from a new, blank account. Nothing to lend credibility to your statements, not even bushleague itch.io stuff, or a cute, toy engine. Give me the goods, otherwise you're just blowing smoke.

> your reply is simultaneously naive and a non-sequitur

Basis? Pretty watery rebuttal for someone so sure of themselves.

> You're not rewriting Unreal

Do you consider the Unreal engine code to be part of "your codebase"?

And Skylines rendering teeth on models miles away https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17gfq13/the...

Sometimes the performance is really ignored.

It cost several human lifetimes if i remember correctly. Still not as bad as windows update which taking the time times wage has set the gdp of a small nation on fire every year..

We've only got a couple of game dev shops in my city, so not sure how common that is.

A senior joining when time is tight makes sense, they don’t want anyone to rock the boat, just to plug the holes.

I think this is uncharitably erasing the context here.

AFAICT, the reason that Helldivers 2 was larger on disk is because they were following the standard industry practice of deliberately duplicating data in such a way as to improve locality and thereby reduce load times. In other words, this seems to have been a deliberate attempt to improve player experience, not something done out of sheer developer laziness. The fact that this attempt at optimization is obsolete these days just didn't filter down to whatever particular decision-maker was at the reins on the day this decision was made.

Though in this case GitHub wasn't bearing the cost, it was gaining a profit...

https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792