Research!

I wholeheartedly agree with your vision. The sad part is that outside of small indie-developers the opinion differs, not from the developer standpoint, but from other sources. (Investors, marketing, management etc.) At least this is the view I have, for companies to adopt better practices like clean code, good design, and such we as developers need the tools to quantify the benefits of these things. Since most of the time they give very little direct benefits but in the long run they are essential, at least that is my view on it, but since I can't quantify it I can't make anyone except other developers agree with me.

Also, on a footnote I'd like to add a very nice little quote about optimization. "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." - Donald Knuth

I'm not saying one shouldn't optimize of course, but one should only do so after a performance issue/bottleneck is found. This is true for most game related development anyhow. Real time systems are a different matter, and I suppose even graphics engines probably need more focus on these things than the rest of the game software. But most people don't work on bleeding edge graphics engines, so I'll generalize and say don't worry about performance unless you actually run into performance issues.

Anyway, good luck with your thesis, I'll look forward to reading about your progress!
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There's no kill like an overkill!

Indeed, I haven't met a developer yet that doesn't agree with this. But developers rarely are the ones in charge except in smaller indie-companies, thus the whole point of my post.

There are even a few solid studies that show that it's better to develop things with good quality than to try and patch it up later, but those studies tend to only state that it's better in the long run.

Without any way to quantify the difference you'll have a hell of a time convincing the people in charge that you want to refactor something (that works, but is ugly) for two months because it's better in the long run, because I bet they'll rather shorten the time to market, or add more features, or...

Although I believe hObbE's study is more aimed at early high-level design? In which case it's naturally good to think it through properly, but even then mistakes can be made that are only discovered later. And some of those mistakes will never be prioritized high enough to get corrected as other things will be more important, like specific bugs/issues, new content/DLC, porting to a new platform etc.

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There's no kill like an overkill!

Cool discussion Although my project is not 100% outlined the goal is to further test and experiment with the ideas of immediate mode and model view controller architecture and compare different parameters (performance, maintainability, changeability etc) with other architectures in different scenarios/game genres. Hence it's more about up-front high-level design.

This is probably nothing that will revolutionize game development, game tech heads have a tendency for an "I know best" mentality and I agree that it will be hard to make the experiments convincing enough for a major developer to try out. And as you say Malice there are a lot of other ppl making decisions with completely different agendas and priorities than top notch architecture/code.

I do hope that we'll find an industry partner that could help shape experiments and scenarios and provide some more "realism" to the project.

I hate to be nitpicking, but "... without scarifying performance." makes my brain hurt.

dictionary.reference.com agrees with me:

scar·i·fy   [skar-uh-fahy] Show IPA
–verb (used with object), -fied, -fy·ing.
1.
to make scratches or superficial incisions in (the skin, a wound, etc.), as in vaccination.
2.
to lacerate by severe criticism.
3.
to loosen (the soil) with a type of cultivator.
4.
to hasten the sprouting of (hard-covered seeds) by making incisions in the seed coats.
5.
to break up (a road surface).

I like hurtinating

Should actually be sacrificing.

Good of you to spot it and tell me Kwissus! Thanks!

No problem!

The text looked copy-pasted from your actual documents, so I figured you might want to correct it. I wouldn't bother correcting a blog/news post...