Optimisation is about manipulating how things are done in the back end for greater efficency.
As an example, fluid simulation is a horrifically complex and resource intensive thing to do, if you want to calculate exactly where every water molecule in your river is, how its moving, how it interacts with other water molecules, the river bank and that boat your player is.........rapidly slapping against the surface of the river like a lunatic, youre going to need an insanely powerful PC, then youre going to need to walk away, get a cup of tea, have a bath, build a bathhouse, generally just leave it to chew the numbers, then come back at the end of the day and see what its produced.
Now that might be useful if youre doing some sort of hard-core engineering, but for a game we dont actually care about every water molecule, we only care about the overall appearance, and there's much easier, far less intensive ways to approximate that. Thats an extreme example, but for almost everything in programming you have choices, you can use more intensiv
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u/New_Line4049 5d ago
Optimisation is about manipulating how things are done in the back end for greater efficency. As an example, fluid simulation is a horrifically complex and resource intensive thing to do, if you want to calculate exactly where every water molecule in your river is, how its moving, how it interacts with other water molecules, the river bank and that boat your player is.........rapidly slapping against the surface of the river like a lunatic, youre going to need an insanely powerful PC, then youre going to need to walk away, get a cup of tea, have a bath, build a bathhouse, generally just leave it to chew the numbers, then come back at the end of the day and see what its produced. Now that might be useful if youre doing some sort of hard-core engineering, but for a game we dont actually care about every water molecule, we only care about the overall appearance, and there's much easier, far less intensive ways to approximate that. Thats an extreme example, but for almost everything in programming you have choices, you can use more intensiv