Chapter 12
Optimizing Your Game
Optimization is a broad subcategory of game development that can be its own career field, much like animation. In simple terms it is the process of improving the efficiency of game performance. It sounds simple, anyway.
Each target platform has limitations in terms of the processing power of its CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit). The more detailed a scene, whether with a few highly detailed models or a great many less detailed moving parts, the higher the demand on the processors.
When the demand gets to be too much, game performance suffers: the player experiences long load times, lags and other glitchy gameplay, or worst of all, the game crashes. The optimization process is ...