D GUI Framework (responsive grid teaser)

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 5/23/19 3:52 PM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> 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.
> 

Of course there's always tradeoffs, but I think you are very much 
overestimating the connection between inherent performance limitations 
and things like API and general usefulness and flexibility. And I think 
you're *SEVERELY* underestimating the flexibility of modern game 
engines. And I say this having personally used modern game engines. Have 
you?

FWIW, On 80's technology, I would completely agree with you. And even to 
some extent on 90's tech. But not today.