Mailsack May 3, 2013

by Stephen Laughlin , Long Beach, CA, Saturday, May 04, 2013, 01:47 (4220 days ago) @ Xenos

When I was hired, I’d never done User Interface for a game before. I got recruited to do the UI for Halo, so I built it to the best of my knowledge, learning as I went along. One day, Jason Jones comes up to me and says, “Dave! You’re killing me!” I’m all, “What’d I do?” Apparently, they found out why the game took a major framerate dive every time you zoomed in the pistol. It was because I was slapping up a texture to cover the whole screen. Very bad, and very, very naïve of me.
David Candland, Senior Artist

Can anyone explain why this is bad? I'm curious what the solution was but I don't know squat about game design.