Computer Science type Question

from Stardock Forums
The Original GC 1.0 for OS/2 ran on a 386 with 8Meg of memory and a 1 meg Video card.

The game today runs on a 600Meg or higher processor with 128Meg or more memory and the average 32Meg Video card.

Is the new game 50 - 100 times more complex than the original game. Other than the new map and video requirements the new game really does not seem like in does much more ?

How does that work in the old days was more attenion was given to conserving memory and optimizing code than now ?

Are new compilers not doing as good of a job more complex ?
123 views 1 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
OS has a larger footprint on the box, so you don't get a 1 to 1 scaling. ANd i have noidea on the internals of the game differences. But in gneral, yeah programers (in general) are more lazy now adays since they have all this extra memory and processer power. Unfortunatly i see the trend getting worse and 10 years from now most programers out there first language will be java, and thats a language that favors laziness. No concept of memory management at the programmers level, although it can be done. ANd most cases it should be done in java. Garbage Collection in java is slow on large multiprocesser systems at the moment. (1.5 of java2 is supposed to take care of that though when ever that gets here)

Though its not all the programers fault, its the suits.. they see lower time to market and big dollar signs blind them to the cost of long term support, that is sometimes attributed to lazy programming.

Optimizing compilers are great, but they can't handle everything. They can shave of 10-20% of execution time, but its still up to the programmer to find the best algorythm, the optimizing compiler just finds a faster implementation of the algorythm, un rolling loops, inline function, register vars, an probly lots of other stuff, never been much into programming compilers.