Chapter 10. A Chapter You Shouldnt Skip - Final Optimizations

What's the most important aspect of any game? According to a very famous e-celebrity, it's being able to play it. Fancy graphics and advanced techniques definitely add a necessary touch of polish to a medium as visual and interactive as video games, but if that gets in the way of enjoying the most fundamental experience of smooth gameplay, the whole thing might as well just be a fancy screensaver. Optimizing code, even when the application runs fine on higher-end machines, is extremely important, since every iteration excludes potential machines that are older but could still be used to expand the fan base of a game.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

• The basics of profiling and reading code metrics

• Analyzing and repairing inefficiencies in our code

• The basics of light culling

Let's not waste any more clock cycles and get to cleaning up some of those inefficiencies!