[MUD-Dev] Jeff's Rant: A World Full of Wheel-Makers

[Adam Martin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Hook" <bwh at wksoftware.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 7:30 AM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Jeff's Rant: A World Full of Wheel-Makers


> While it's easy to blame programmer ego for NIH, there are simply
> too many real-life cases where you really do have to roll it
> yourself, and this has very little to do with just programmer egos.

> I don't have time to go into a complete list, but off the top of my
> head here are some thoughts: 

To add one more: For performance reasons, you need to rewrite the code
every time the ISA changes. I first heard this one from a developer
from one of the big studios.

The claim he made was that they were low-level-optimising their code
so intensively in order to achieve their desired features on the
commonly available hardware, that re-optmizing most game modules to
take advantage of a single new instruction (e.g. Pentium, P-2, P-3,
P-4) was indeed worth the effort. I felt I finally understood why that
developer's games tended to always look so much more advanced than the
competition - other people had the same game-ideas, but just couldn't
get them to run at acceptable speeds on the available hardware.

Adam M

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