[MUD-Dev] Is database access a bottleneck?

[Koster]

From: bradley newton haug

> Borrowing a little concept from 'Conversations':

>   "Database Engineer": Oh my mistake.  Carry on.  I have to finish
>   designing this massive enterprise solution, there isn't anything
>   here that the game industry could use, so just ignore me, and
>   the thousands of man years of labor and thought that I
>   represent.
 
>   "Military Simulation Engineer": You get used to it.  They're
>   still cheering about inventing things I've been doing for 20
>   years and consider about as complex as breathing.
  
>   "Artificial Intelligence Researcher": Well at least someone
>   doesn't come along every 3 or 4 years, use one idea isolated
>   from the rest of your work and then build an entire sophomoric
>   game around it, claiming brilliance.

Everything you so amusingly described here is definitely true in the
game industry. There's a distaste for academia that is incredibly
short-sighted in my opinion, and a reluctance to make use of tools
or techniques developed elsewhere. It's all stupid.

On the other hand, it didn't arise out of thin air. Quite aside from
the not-invented-here symdrome characteristic of largely self-taught
hackers, there's the fact that many of the solutions arrived at by
academic AI researchers and military simulation developers are
simply not practical in games development. Kind of like how most of
the demos that the video card engineers provide to the game
developers aren't practical.

I frequently see military projects using game-like technology that
took years to make and cost millions of dollars and probably could
have been done in a few weeks by any competent FPS team in the
industry. It's not uncommon to see AI solutions that work great in a
Java applet but fail miserably when you need to apply them to real
world scenarios, like the amount of memory in a game console or an
actual interesting game map or whatever.

It cuts both ways; people on both sides of the fence need to gain
more respect for what the other does and does well. It's the
insularity and automatic assumption that "we know better" that is
the problem across the board.

-Raph

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