Halo MP Is now Free to Play (Gaming)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Tuesday, August 04, 2020, 09:32 (1360 days ago) @ Cody Miller

But again, you are min-maxing tasks on average of how often they come up. So that could kill some games vs other games.

Alain Roy is sitting around one day with nothing to do. So Jason Jones tells him to profile Marathon's game code. He wanted to get the graphics routines running faster. So Alain looks at the code, and finds something… it turns out that almost 30% of the runtime is calculating the positions of platforms.

He takes this back to Jason. Jason's like "Wow, you're so full of shit! There's no way. You must not have used the profiler correctly. Read up on it, and do it again right. Alain does it again. Same result. 30% of the time the game is figuring out where platforms are.

Confronted with this, Jason still didn't believe it. He took it and looked at it himself. Ten minutes later, he came back to Alain.

"Okay, you were right. The code is so busted."

That day Jason rewrote the platform code, and it ended up being about 20% faster.

I mean, yeah, that's a thing. But you can't compare a game and hardware from that era to now. You don't compare a walkman to an iPhone even if they can do the same thing.