#opimization

[hyoga-3d]

Performance in games is a constant topic, games platforms processing power are constantly growing, but so are the games complexity created for these platforms, so for those of you who are there trying to squeeze each fps you can get this post about Basic Game Optimization Techniques might come in hand.

When having performance issues in your game start by profiling it, most game engines will have some tool to do it, and you will get a lot of insights in what’s happening under the hood.

After identifying what is the true problem of your game you may apply a suited solution for it, of course it all depends on the problem, this post focuses more on “programming stuff”, like memory speed and parallel programming, but there are many other ways to improve performance like the LOD technique, lightmaps, texture atlasing and others.

So it’s always good to have this techniques under your belt because they could be of good use in sometime. Have you had any performance issue in one of your games? What techniques did you used to solve?

[formlessandempty]

Commitment Anxiety: Optimal is not fretting about what is optimal.

Any time I ever have opportunities for commitments, I enter into a pro and con state of mind, and in some cases—the ones of importance—this can become crippling, rather than productive. Within me are two highly conflicting tendencies when it comes to commitments: the first is a desire to make an optimal decision (all options considered and this is the best one), the second is to be unwaveringly decisive. These tend to collide in a way such that my unwillingness to make a suboptimal choice demands that I damn well better make the right decision when it comes down to it, which often means exhaustive thought over every possible facet and minutia of the choice in question, which often means working myself up to the point where I get so tunnel-visioned over things that are actually very low on the list of importance, that I work into an anxiety attack (visual distortions give it away), and inflict upon myself a mood of worry that can sometimes make me back out entirely from deciding at all, because the thought of making the wrong choice can sometimes overpower me from wanting to make any choice: textbook paralysis by analysis.

In science and math, right and wrong tend to rule, and where things are not black and white, they are at least probabilistic (generally speaking here). Constant analysis and scrutiny over details within this realm tends to pay off well, and that I think has at times made me apply the same methods towards analyzing "life problems", and while there is a lot of validity to this kind of strict analytical approach, fussing over details ad infinitum pays off far less often in the non-ideal world.

The key thing that I've realized over time—though I admittedly, like today, can fall back into this fruitless pattern of thought—is that analysis is a very good thing to do, but when it comes to decisions, the focus needs to be on making a good one, rather than the best one. While what I'm about to say is intellectually obvious, I've had a hard time actually accepting it to where I actually "take to heart" it's meaning: life is complicated. Ah, yes, the cliché, the trite that tends to be true. And so, slowly, and continually, in conjunction with my constant effort to accept that I am far less intelligent than I think I am, I try to accept that as a human being with highly limited perceptions and understandings, I can't make optimal decisions, because I can't possibly know enough information to make the "best" one. This may seem obvious, but it hasn't been easy for me to accept, which is to say, I still don't accept it at times. What I do know is that once decisions are made, I tend to adapt well; this is something that humans are good at. So, when it comes down to decisions, my truly optimal process is a two-step one:

Analysis, and then a willingness to say "fuck it" and go with my gut.