Quote:Original post by Nytegard
I actually think programmers are getting worse overall...

The better compilers are making people more lazy. The more memory and hard disk are making people lazier. Trying to create a game with a 4 MHz processor and 32KB of RAM & 64 KB of diskspace on a slow access tape is completely different than with a 2 GHz processor and over 2 GB of RAM and gigabytes of diskspace (at 7200+ RPM/sec).

I agree with this. I think that as hardware has gotten better, programmers have become sloppier. I remeber back when WarCraft II came out, one of the best things that I liked about it had nothing to do with the gameplay itself. It was simply the fact that it required only an 80MHz processor to run (that was back when the stadard was 200MHz). These guys wrote tight, efficient code. These days, there are games which require a 2.8GHz processor, 64MB of VRAM and they still run like molasses. Where the programmers aiming too high or did they not program efficiently?

The one thing that I am really afraid about is that as we get farther from the low-level details, programmers will have a smaller understanding of the underlying principles that make these tools work. It is my opinion that if one wants to be really good at anything, one needs to not only know that something works but how it works as well.

Quote:Original post by TheWanderer
I agree with this. I think that as hardware has gotten better, programmers have become sloppier. I remeber back when WarCraft II came out, one of the best things that I liked about it had nothing to do with the gameplay itself. It was simply the fact that it required only an 80MHz processor to run (that was back when the stadard was 200MHz). These guys wrote tight, efficient code. These days, there are games which require a 2.8GHz processor, 64MB of VRAM and they still run like molasses. Where the programmers aiming too high or did they not program efficiently?

Right, so you are comparing a 2D game, which probably ran at 640*480 in 256color to a modern game which runs at least at 800*600, in 32bit color, in 3d, with more graphical content than you can shake a stick at, more sounds than they dreamt possible back then, better AI, better collison detection and general mores stuff going on...

Hey! Mr Apples, meet Ms Oranges...

having a programming job in a non-entertainment software company, and doing game programming as a hobby, i'll say that my game programming is more challenging and mentally stimulating than my job programming.

i work in the billing department at my company, and billing systems are arguably the most complex parts of companies. having designed a large part of our billing system internals and maintaining it on a regular basis, i'll say that it is not even as complicated as, say, the part of my game code that partitions, determines visibility, performs physics, and does other more complex things having to do with just the virtual envronment.

maybe it's because i'm a perfectionist, but i feel there is much less room for poor programming in a game than in, well, the billing system i maintain (or any non-real time application for that matter). i spend hours upon hours designing a game algorithm, but give much less thought to algorithms i implement at my job. at my job it's ok if a function that could run in less than a second takes more than 5 seconds. while it's enough for my job programs to simply work, for games this is just the starting point. game algorithms must take the least amount of time and use the least amount of resources, be the most aware of how other parts of the system work (i.e. the video hardware), etc. etc. you just don't see this level of detail with most other programming. while an exception might be OS designers and low level programmers in general, i don't think these are today's "average" programmers. case in point: i try to structure my game code to use less conditionals, because conditionals mean jmp instructions and jmp instructions are expensive.

Quote:Original post by _the_phantom_

Right, so you are comparing a 2D game, which probably ran at 640*480 in 256color to a modern game which runs at least at 800*600, in 32bit color, in 3d, with more graphical content than you can shake a stick at, more sounds than they dreamt possible back then, better AI, better collison detection and general mores stuff going on...

Hey! Mr Apples, meet Ms Oranges...

I was comparing WarCraft 2 with other games at the time (i.e. the ones that required 200MHz). Even so, I believe that even today you can still find examples of games which use lots of resources yet fall far short in terms of performance when compared to others with smaller requirements.

Still, point well taken. I should have presented a better comparison.

Quote:Original post by mikeman
We just said that in general, the average game programmer tends to be more talented than the application programmer,

It said general programmer.

Application programming usually involes VB and a database. My mom could do that with a bit of guidance. Yeah. No shit you're better than that.

I don't know if programmers are getting better or not, but it's clear to me that the amount of knowledge required to be on the cutting edge of gaming technology is increasing at an incredible rate.

15 years ago, if you could figure out how to do a bit blit and draw lines, you were mostly set. Add in some relatively simple sound synthesizer stuff, and that's about it. The trouble came from getting it to be fast. There maybe were a couple games that toyed around with 3D, but at that point it was pretty much all wireframe or flat shaded stuff.

Nowadays, look at what all might go into a cutting edge game that people didn't even dream of back then: 3D graphics with texturing, bump-mapping, per-pixel lighting, spherical harmonics for faked global illumination in real time, environment mapping, parametric surfaces, subdivision surfaces, HDR rendering with exposure and bloom effects, rendering with arbitrary BRDFs, etc. Smoothly skinned characters with inverse kinematics, hair and cloth simulation, and rag doll physics. Worlds where objects that are kilometres away must be displayed at the same time that objects that are centimeters away are displayed, all done smoothly with no noticeable transitions. Positional audio, thousands of sound effects. Network play with dozens or hundreds of people all interacting with each other at the same time, with voice communication between them.

Datasets are getting into the range of dozens or hundreds of megabytes for a single level. It's not a coincidence that the time to make a level in Doom 3 was measured in weeks, while with the original Doom it was measured in hours.

And it isn't as if this trend is going to get any better. It's looking as if all the next generation consoles will require parallel programming techniques to get any reasonable efficiency out of them. Dual core CPUs are going to be introduced starting next year for PCs, and it isn't going to just stop there. It isn't easy to program for multiple processors.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that although the hardware is getting more powerful, which makes our jobs easier, the expectations for what we should accomplish are getting much higher, which makes our jobs harder.

j