The account I saw this on is protected, so I can’t H/T it, but dear LORD.
…Have we thought about maybe doing better optimization of game code? Or any optimization for size? I know Moore’s Law is still hanging in there, but there’s a limit to how far we can go. Planck’s, if nobody else’s.
Did the Mind Flayers test this patch? Asking for a friend.
We have absolutely been optimizing software for speed of development, first, and almost anything else, second. For years, now. Decades.
I had a programming professor who thought that the programmer’s time was the most valuable commodity in developing a program. I disagree, but then I don’t program for a living.
As a professional programmer (but not of videogames): your professor is probably right in most contexts. At the same time, optimizing a process for a single variable (like speed of development) can have unintended consequences, like requiring huge, bloated frameworks to run relatively simple applications (which tends mean that the same application requires more memory to store and to run).
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And, in fairness, videogames (and especially ‘AAA’ games) have another major pressure on disk space usage: art assets, which are growing in size for other reasons, including increased video resolution and rendering detail.
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It’s not all bad, but the size of some recent titles is really something.
As a tester I’ve watched as various inputs get optimized which then cause others to fall over. It’s a whack-a-mole game, but as long as the big performance backlogs are taken care of it usually works out ok-ish.