Re: Why Lisp supposedly "sucks for game development"

From: Bob Coyne (bobcoyne_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 10/24/04 

Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 00:27:38 GMT

Kenny Tilton wrote:

>
> [...]
>
> I feel that I should still address what exactly it is that affects the
> performance. If a game is well written, by people who know how to
> properly use the API, then performance is in the hands of the guys who
> make graphics cards and drivers. No one else has anything to do with
> it anymore. What determines performance is how well the API, driver,
> operating system, and hardware interact. On one of my computers, for
> example, OpenGL runs somewhat faster. I do know, however, that this is
> due to an incompatibility between DirectX and WindowsXP and my GeForce
> MX100/200 card/driver.

Maybe I missed some other discussion of it, but I think you also need to
consider
non-graphical display performance issues. For example, many games require
collision detection and/or physical simulation. If you have a game with
a bowling
ball knocking down pins, you need to simulate the physics and collisions
of those
pins getting knocked down. That's very computationally expensive and
not part of any
standard api like OpenGl. The same goes for skeletal dynamics and
inverse kinematics
to have characters move and react in their environments. Also, some
game engines
do internal ray-tracing so that game agents can be aware of their
environment by
"seeing" what's around them. Again, all this requires lots of
computational power.

There's no reason, of course, why Lisp can't do all this efficiently if
care is taken
to avoid obvious pitfalls like floating point boxing.

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