My experience with optimizing a game engine
Friday, October 26th, 2007"You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything"
– Donald Knuth
As with every new programmer I would spend endless hours trying to squeeze optimization out of every small piece of code on my engine . I wanted it to be the fastest. I always thought that writing every line of code in assembly would make a super fast engine, not knowing that the compiler would probably optimize my code better. I would spend long hours studying SSE instructions. Well one advantage is that I am no longer afraid of ASM , but I was generally unhappy that my engine was not be super optimized and nearly as fast as a commercial game, even though it was probably doing only 25% of the tasks. Colleagues (just as inexperienced as me at the time) would come up to me and say 'Hey, you know this guy, he wrote a whole OS in assembly'. And we would all think that this guy wrote the best OS in the world. But hey, wait a minute. Then why are over 80% of the desktops still using Windows?