OSNews thread here degenerates into GC vs not

[Bill Baxter]

Lutger wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>  > With a tight schedule, a good strategy is to not waste time optimizing
> 
>> any one particular thing until you *know* it is a bottleneck.  Game 
>> developers tend to be pretty ruthless in applying this principle.  For 
>> the Civ4 SDK, something that will only be used directly by a tiny 
>> fraction of Civ4 users, there's just not a lot of bottom line 
>> justification for putting resources there, when compared to say fixing 
>> a crash bug that 10% of players are likely to encounter.
>>
>> So yeh, that's why folks like the Civ team and the folks behind Eve 
>> Online are willing to go with Python.  For most things Python is fast 
>> enough, and gets the job done much more quickly than C++.  For the 
>> small fracton of the code where it's not fast enough, you can always 
>> re-write those bits in C and call it from Python.
>>
>> --bb
> 
> 
> Civilization 4 is structured in roughly 4 layers:
> 1. core engine build on gamebryo (C++) - closed source
> 2. core game logic (120K LoC, a C++ DLL) - open source
> 3. python scripting (game logic, ui, terrain generation, etc.)
> 4. xml data (static data)
> 
> The C++ SDK is layer 2, so this affects all users. I don't know where 
> bottlenecks lie here, but I suspect it is in 1 or 2.
> 
> I'm not sure (nobody is as it hasn't happened yet), but I wouldn't be 
> surprised that if these parts of a large game are written in D 
> performance will go up instead of down, even if the D compiler doesn't 
> optimize as well as a good C++ compiler. For this kind of application I 
> can't believe a little slower floating point calculation will matter as 
> much as ease of high level design and maintenance optimizations.

Just to be clear I don't think floating point performance is going  to 
make a lick of difference in a game like Civ4.  It's only going to even 
have a chance of being a factor in a game that does massive amounts of 
realistic physics and accurate 3D collision detection.  Hmm and 3D 
character animation -- that's pretty heavy on the fpu too.

--bb