Greetings all! It is I, your egotistical person you don't know creating a topic that's not a horribly unfunny game review! This instead is a horribly unfunny query of opinions!
Allow me to elaborate. During my offices Christmas celebration, as I had no one else I wanted to speak with, I spent a good hour chatting with the Associate Dean of Research (I work at a University), a man who earned his PHD some 30 years ago and apparently never left the academic field.
One of the topics that came up (As we were both programmers, myself a fake one and him a real one in the 70's) was what I termed "Lazy programming". The entire point of this blathering post is to get some other, hopefully more experienced opinions on this.
Now, allow me to elaborate. During the early days of computing, memory was ludicrously limited. While it seemed that everything was possible, and advances in programming were made at every turn, the limitations were the hardware. Your algorithms had to be precise, well implimented and planned. Everything had to work well. Your imagination had to wait.
Then time passes, hardware and the effects of the software improve around the same rate, and then suddenly, processing power and memory... become non factors. You no longer had these arbitrary limits, and could obtain the same performance with less and less compact code. Other aspects of the system increase as well, lending helping caches to improve performance in other ways. Disappearing are the little tricks that had to be coded to make your code run more effeciently, make an object appear as it did not, make loading times minimal. Replacing them appears to be a reliance on brute force of processing power.
This was also mentioned by that guy at Bioware, or Epic. I should fact check more. He was noting that crappy coding was affecting the PS3 because the cell demanded good code. That appears to me to be a confirmation of certain problems. From what I have observed, programmers seem to be more and more using the brute force of a console rather than their own ingenuity, and calling things failures when the brute force wasn't delivering (See Lair developers Factor 5). While this mostly applies to computer programs in general (Considering the processing and memory we have now, it's shocking the wait required for some applications), video gaming as a whole seems to be facing this problem right now, and taking shortcuts out (Hello Capcom and your huge manditory installs!) while coding instead of using the old method of working the hardware to the max, then tweaking it to perform better than expected.
I actually like the 360 a bit for forcing programmers to work their best without a harddrive as extra memory, make them maximize their code, even if the system still may power through on other fronts.
Now the opinion call. Am I totally off base with this, is this far too early into programming where the tips and shortcuts available through wise programming just havn't been discovered, that the programmers will begin to put effort into maximizing output with minimal input over time? Or is this trend worrying anyone else? That reliance on power is taking over reliance on effeciency?
See Ya George.
"He did not die - He passed Away"
At least following a comedians own jokes makes his death easier.
