[lordnikon001]

I think what irks people is the number one rule of optimization is to always measure

You never assume something is an optimization or needed and never do hypothetical optimizations

I can see why it would happen in this case though, gamedev is chaotic and you're often really pressed for time

[forrestthewoods]

WebDevs who have build systems that take ten minutes and download tens of megabytes of JS and have hundreds of milliseconds of lag are sooooooooooooo not allowed to complain about game devs ever.

[Dylan16807]

Oh, at first I thought you were talking about websites doing that and I was going to say "sure, those people can't complain, but the rest of us can".

Then I realized you said build systems and eh, whatever. It's not good for build systems to be bloated, but it matters a lot less than the end product being bloated.

And you seem to be complaining about the people that are dealing with these build systems themselves, not inflicting them on other people? Why don't they get to complain?

[bigstrat2003]

> Oh, at first I thought you were talking about websites doing that

I'm pretty sure that is in fact what he meant, and that "have build systems" is a typo of "have built systems".

[forrestthewoods]

Download bloat is net less impactful than build time bloat imho. Game download and install size bloat is bad. But is a mostly one time cost. Build time bloat doesn’t directly impact users, but iteration time is GodKing so bad build times indirectly hurt consumers.

But that’s all beside the point. What I was really doing was criticizing the <waves hands wildly> HN commenters. HN posters are mostly webdevs because most modern programmers are webdevs. And while I won’t say the file bloat here wasn’t silly, I wonder stand for game dev slander from devs that commit faaaaaaaaaaaaaar greater sins.

[Dylan16807]

Web devs are not a hivemind. That kind of criticism doesn't work well at all when pointed at the entirety of the site.

> Download bloat is net less impactful than build time bloat imho.

Download bloat is a bad problem for people on slow connections, and there's a lot of people on slow connections. I really dislike when people don't take that into account.

And even worse if they're paying by the gigabyte in a country with bad wireless prices, that's so much money flushed down the drain.

[forrestthewoods]

Believe you me I wish every website worked on 2G. HN is great at least.

For consoles total disk space is an even bigger constraint than download size. But file size is a factor. Call of Duty is known to be egregious. It’s a much more complex problem than most people realize. Although hopefully not as trivial a fix as Helldivers!

In any case HN has a broadly dismissive attitude towards gamedevs. It is irksome. And deeply misplaced. YMMV.