D for Game Development

[Kapps via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 21:27:09 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 15:10:59 UTC, Brandon Ragland 
> wrote:
>> It's a dog because Java is a dog. But that's not because of 
>> the GC.
>>
>> It's not really that bad either, I can open up Minecraft at 
>> any time and have it sit in the background quietly using 
>> ~800Mb ram and virtually no cpu time.
>>
>> Either your kid has tons of mods in their Minecraft or your 
>> computer is a bit dated.
>
> Now compare that kind of resources consumption with any game 
> based on Quake III engine. While you are at it, compare the 
> graphisms. Still not convinced ? Measure latencies, which are 
> critical for most games.

People always compare things to Minecraft when discussing if 
garbage collection is feasible in a game. Which is annoying, 
because I'm sure Minecraft's allocations would make most people 
sad. It's not a fair comparison.

Some quotes:
"Minecraft 1.8 has so many performance problems that I just don't 
know where to start with. Maybe the biggest and the ugliest 
problem is the memory allocation. Currently the game allocates 
(and throws away immediately) 50 MB/sec when standing still and 
up to 200 MB/sec when moving. That is just crazy."

But that was just a one off thing for 1.8 I believe, the normal 
is much better:
"How did that work in previous releases? The previous Minecraft 
releases were much less memory hungry. The original Notch code 
(pre 1.3) was allocating about 10-20 MB/sec which was much more 
easy to control and optimize."

10-20 MB of garbage every second. That's just ridiculous to think 
of in a language like D. And that was long ago, it's probably 
worse now. Luckily D has things like ranges and other ways of 
improving this.

Source: 
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/1272953-1-8-7-optifine-hd-d6-fps-boost-hd-textures-aa-af?page=2111#c43757