I don't think that's how it works. I believe it's more a case of the code they are using now is in a fairly easy-to-understand and obvious form, but not necessarily the most efficient. If they have to make changes to the current code to enable new features to work alongside them, it would take a lot more time and energy to adjust it if they were in their more compact and efficient form. I have only a fairly basic knowledge of programming, so anyone with more experience please correct me.
Surely you design the system in a modular fashion in the first place, so that you can add features to your super optimized engine without losing said optimizations. The way I see it, as an engineer myself, the only reason optimizations would be lost when adding new features is if the foundation of the engine was not coded in a modular fashion to pre-empt inevitable features? Edit: Also as an engineer I can totally appreciate that this is a 'perfect world' scenario I am describing, but the principal of design I am talking about should be an ideal which should be constantly aimed for.
Uber are taking a prototyping and iterative approach to a degree, so there's plenty of opportunity for code to be thrown away. There's also the fact that the longer they work on the engine, the more guys they have that can fulfil their roles because there is no foundation to actually start building their features on. Lastly, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody intentionally writes bad code, it's just incredibly difficult to predict optimizations before you've written the code.
That's really a good news. for me Alpha is all about "I love you, me neither". Some day i will love it, some day i will hate it. It took me a while to feel the power of PA. That was just yesterday when playing a FFA with 4 players. We started to have terrible lag after 10minutes. Then i discovered one of the opponent was expanding like hell and was responsible for lots of resources to be used (network obviously). But that was not a problem. I was so much happy to play this game and just thinking : When optimization will be in place PA will be a killer app Even without the multi planet system, PA is all about lots of fun.
