Template Metaprogramming Made Easy (Huh?)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"language_fan" <foo at bar.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:h8dth4$28h5$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:10:28 +0000, BCS thusly wrote:
>
>> If I ever am in a position to do it, I will mandate that executive demos
>> will always be first done using a 10-25th percentile machine from our
>> current target market. Only once it is shown to run reasonably on that,
>> will the team be allowed to show what it can do on better hardware.
>
> I wonder how you can do that. E.g. if you are on the console game
> industry, the platforms and their capabilities are well known. No
> developer will want to write code for something prev gen.

It's a little more complicated than that. The prev gen are often just plain 
different platforms, so it's more than just deling with somewhat lower 
specs. And even if the developers want to, the publisher suits aren't 
necessrily going to care much about anything that isn't the "latest, 
greatest and most 'buzz'ed platform". And with the possible exception of 
Sony, the console manufacturers themselves like to abandon their old systems 
to help push the new.

> The lead coders
> and their superiors also have experience in optimizing the pre-releases
> and know how much can be improved each time. Agile development methods
> are used so the final result does not really come as a surprise. Often
> the timeframe of a final release is as low as 6 months, with one month
> iterations. There simply is not time to hand optimize every possible bit.

Console game development does use a lot of optimization, but as far as 
actual code that needs to be optimized, that's largely located within the 
middleware. So the development process of the actual *game* studio isn't 
quite as relevant here as that of the middleware developers.

> Many have switched to c# from obj-c and c++, because the legacy languages
> just suck when they are in a hurry.

I have a hard time believing anything other then Xbox/PC exclusives are 
written in C#. And even then it would just be because, again, the actual 
game studio programmers are usually just doing game logic these days, and 
glueing middleware together, and that's not where the vast majority of all 
the bytes and cycles go.