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Comment by jspthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

All of what you say is wise, but the engineer doesn't work for the studio and isn't on Doom 3's release timeline. He made the game's frame rate 15% faster of his own volition simply because he could. So it's wrapped in a sales pitch, oh well.

"I see something I can improve, but I had better not improve it; were I to work at id, my time would probably be more valuably spent on other things."

I wish you'd just back off and laud the improvement rather than fitting it into your model of game development and continuing to double down on a snarky, dismissive comment that basically shits on somebody else's work. I certainly appreciate that you've worked in professional game development, but come on, someone did something cool. I'm sorry that it isn't cool enough for you or doesn't use the measurements you prefer.

Attitudes like yours hurt our industry as a whole.

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This article is clearly trying to sell licenses for a commercial product based on unsupported, possibly deceptive claims. I don't laud that. If the goal here is to prove the value of this analysis software, they should be proving it in terms of the value it will produce for an actual company developing software - if they're proving value for a game studio, it should probably be in the context I provided above. For other kinds of developers, maybe they have infinite time and their constrained resource is engineer knowledge - in that case this software could be valuable. But you don't demonstrate that using video games.

Hacker News isn't about selling things to managers who make purchasing decisions by lying to them, last time I checked.

Oh, now they're lying? Care to back that one up? That's a steep accusation that you should probably reconsider attaching to your name.

They wrote a tool to find things to parallelize. They parallelize them, the code gets faster. I realize that it isn't the faster you would prefer, but they picked an accessible target that everybody could understand. It isn't as cool if they say "we made Excel render graphs 15% faster" or "we made MP3 transcoding 15% faster". They just made a code base faster using their tool, that's all.

If they had made a video editor faster and you'd worked on video editors all your life, I'm sure you'd be here shitting on the achievement as well. They're not a game development shop. They picked a game to screw around with. They made it quicker. It just happens to be your pet area, so you absolutely cannot stand that someone figured out how to do something in your little world that you wouldn't think of.

I'm impressed you've upgraded to outright calling them liars now rather than just admit, maybe, you might be wrong.

> He made the game's frame rate 15% faster of his own volition simply because he could.

This isn't some lone engineer's noble cause. This is a sales product demonstration.

> Attitudes like yours hurt our industry as a whole.

No it doesn't. People SHOULD be critical of demonstrations like these because they are rarely representative of real world behaviour.

People who have never used software should be critical of "here's what our software can do with inexperienced hands, maybe you'll do better"? I'd much rather default to giving benefit of the doubt than assuming everything sucks before I've even touched it. Reminded of people who say they don't like exotic food but have never eaten it.

I think the lowest opinion on the totem pole is one formed by assumptions (based upon personal experience with an area) used to reflect upon something from the hip. "I'm pretty versed in game development, and what these people are doing is stupid based on my world view."

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