LÖVE

dont optimize unless you really, really need it

Doctory wrote:dont optimize unless you really, really need it

but why? optimizing isn't that hard and it might pay off if one decides to the port the game to mobile devices with the unofficial ports of löve

jjmafiae wrote:

Doctory wrote:dont optimize unless you really, really need it

but why? optimizing isn't that hard and it might pay off if one decides to the port the game to mobile devices with the unofficial ports of löve

It is just one of those things that people throw around a lot without giving it much thought. Sure, it is true that Spending 90% of your time optimizing is not a very smart thing to do, but not thinking about it at all will land you in a lot of trouble. It is a very common thing to read in post mortems from developers who actually released a game, that they wish that they spent more time optimizing.

jjmafiae wrote:

Doctory wrote:dont optimize unless you really, really need it

but why? optimizing isn't that hard and it might pay off if one decides to the port the game to mobile devices with the unofficial ports of löve

In programming, everything is a tradeoff. Making the code run faster often means making it less readable. On the other hand, readable code can be done faster easily, but turning "optimized" code into readable is much more time consuming. For that reason, make the code easy to read first, and then add optimizations when you need them. 97% of the time you don't need them.

To answer with your own example: let's assume that you do a lot of "clever" optimizations and the code runs super fast on the desktop (but it is not very readable). But then you try it on mobile it throws an error. Now you have two problems: you must find that error, and at the same time deal with difficult to read code. If you had let the readable code with no optimizations, you would have had only one of those problems (or even none - it's possible that the clever optimizations were what was making the mobile version fail in the first place).

Love is too fun to quit

+1

What kikito said, plus: optimising naively is a great way to make your game perform worse, especially if you take into account other platforms.

If you want to optimise so badly, try instead looking at ways how you can your big ohs smaller.

Getting some optimizations engine wise wouldn't hurt though, there is probably some inefficient systems here and there