pc upgrade for patch 1.3

It drives me nuts that programmers today waste so much memory and power producing their stuff that in order to play with it you have to go and buy a new computer. Microsoft are the worst for this, but UbiSoft are busy catching them. In effect, you are spending $1000 to play a game costing less than $50 and all because the early ethic of careful programming has been done away with.

So much of what is "added" to games today really does not need to be there and the consequences are as described. What is there is, is written in wasteful code. Remember the old spectrum computer? In those days we thought 56k was blisteringly fast and some incredible things were done by programmers to bring amazing programs to us with such slow processors. Now, we have vast amounts of memory (by comparison), massive hard drives and super fast cpu's and the stuff being produced will hardly run at all. Something has gone very squiffy and I am sure its because programmers have grown lazy and no longer try and save either memory or space.

I remember buying the flight sim, Combat Flight Simulator 3. It would not run on my old computer but I was buying a new one and looking forwards to runing it on there. I expected great things....I got rubbish! It has to rank as one of the worst flight sims ever produced. Filled with errors, you had to wait until a patch was released even to play the damn thing and when you got the patch it was still rubbish. The game play is dire and the graphics appalling. Everyone I know who bought it, felt ripped off by lazy over paid programmers out to make a quick buck and stuff the customer. To add insult to injury, very soon after conning thousands of people into buying it, they then released Fire Power. The program that CFS 3 should have been! I refused to buy it on principle and now will not buy any more Microsoft software because I am sick of being treated like a fool by their programming staff and marketing boys.

I wont be buying Silent Hunter 4 for the same reasons. I want a game I can play on the current crop of computers. Not something I have to buy a new system for.

(Climbs off soapbox)

[btaft]

It drives me nuts that programmers today waste so much memory and power producing their stuff that in order to play with it you have to go and buy a new computer. Microsoft are the worst for this, but UbiSoft are busy catching them. In effect, you are spending $1000 to play a game costing less than $50 and all because the early ethic of careful programming has been done away with.

So much of what is "added" to games today really does not need to be there and the consequences are as described. What is there is, is written in wasteful code. Remember the old spectrum computer? In those days we thought 56k was blisteringly fast and some incredible things were done by programmers to bring amazing programs to us with such slow processors. Now, we have vast amounts of memory (by comparison), massive hard drives and super fast cpu's and the stuff being produced will hardly run at all. Something has gone very squiffy and I am sure its because programmers have grown lazy and no longer try and save either memory or space.

Although I don't doubt there are some lazy programmers out there, computers are also being asked to do a lot more than ever before

16 Colors vs. 32 bit color
320x240 resolution vs. 1600 x 1200
plain color vs. shading, texturing, fog, antiaising etc
static environment vs dynamic environment
2d simulation vs full 3d simulation
monotone sound vs multi-channel surround sound

You start to add up all of these order of magnitude changes/improvements and you quickly start to eat up memory, bandwidth, cpu cycles, etc. regardless of how efficient the code may be

[Powerthighs]

Something has gone very squiffy and I am sure its because programmers have grown lazy and no longer try and save either memory or space.

I think the problem is more that programmers these days are wrtiting several abstractions above the lowest layer, much more so than 20 years ago. It becomes more and more difficult to be optimal when you are relying on tons of code running under you. The tremendous increase in complexity also makes it difficult to really trim the performance if you are pushing anywhere near the state of the art, not to mention to fluctations in hardware, driver versions, etc.