On Thursday, 23 May 2019 at 19:32:28 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
Game engines *MUST* be *EFFICIENT* in order facilitate the
demands the games place on them. And "efficiency" *means*
efficiency: it means minimizing wasted processing, and that
*inherently* means *both* speed and battery.
I think there is a slight disconnection in how different people
view efficency. You argue that this is some kind of absolute
metric. I would argue that it is a relative metric, and it is
relative to flexibility and power.
This isn't specific to games.
For instance, there is no spatial datatructure that is inherently
better or more efficient than all other spatial datastructures.
It depends on what you need to represent. It depends on how often
you need to update. It depends on what kind of queries you want
to do. And so on.
This is where a generic application/UI framework will have to
give priority to being generally useful in the most general sense
and give priority to flexibility and expressiveness.
A first person shooter game engine, can however make a lot of
assumptions. That will make it more efficient for a narrow set of
cases, but also completely useless in the most general sense. It
also limits what you can do, quite severely.
