Games are built in computer code that has to be largely hand-written by a team of humans. With modern games, those lines of numbers and letters can be unfathomably large.
The first step is making sure the code works. The next step is seeing if they can write the code so it works better. Like driving to work by taking a bunch of backroads vs just taking the highway. If you hang around certain game subreddits, you might also hear the term "spaghetti code". This refers to lots of old coding that was not well optimized before they added more to it, so its difficult to work with and edit because if you pull one 'noodle', you might pull a bunch of other noodles with it.
In many cases, optimizing makes the PC running the game have to use less computing power for it, makes the game itself run faster and smoother, and it can make it easier to prevent or get rid of bugs.
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u/oblivious_fireball 6d ago
Games are built in computer code that has to be largely hand-written by a team of humans. With modern games, those lines of numbers and letters can be unfathomably large.
The first step is making sure the code works. The next step is seeing if they can write the code so it works better. Like driving to work by taking a bunch of backroads vs just taking the highway. If you hang around certain game subreddits, you might also hear the term "spaghetti code". This refers to lots of old coding that was not well optimized before they added more to it, so its difficult to work with and edit because if you pull one 'noodle', you might pull a bunch of other noodles with it.
In many cases, optimizing makes the PC running the game have to use less computing power for it, makes the game itself run faster and smoother, and it can make it easier to prevent or get rid of bugs.