too many arm chair game devs who think they know better in this thread
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
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm pretty sure that is in fact what he meant, and that "have build systems" is a typo of "have built systems".
Wow! It looks like I do indeed know better.