No no, you all got it wrong. This is what REALLY happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H8bnKdf654

The expense is not from inventing new things, the expense is from the implementation, the development, the QA. It costs money to program things, if you haven't noticed. The longer and more intensive the work is, the more money that must be spent. Greater cost = more risk = less support from those who can actually support the cost. Back in the SupCom1 days, no company except THQ wanted to publish SupCom because it was too ambitious, too expensive, too risky. What if GPG failed and SupCom flopped? Millions of dollars lost on development. From what I heard, SupCom vanilla cost around $10 million to develop. You think people will just be willing to toss that much money out to develop novel technologies that not many will use? Perhaps within the confines of the scientific community, but not in the business world.

madface, I applaud your naive optimism. Your views represent what we all want the industry to be like. But reality is harsh, and no project of your sort will be undertaken except possibly by Activision, or VALVe, or EA. And those are the companies that don't want risky investments like the ones you are proposing.

You are in academia, right? Do you ever have time limits on project completion? That you must finish a research project within a certain amount of time? That you must find the optimal algorithm within a week? That you must build a working prototype of a quantum computer within 6 months? You cannot view GPG as a research group utilizing the latest and the greatest technology. They don't get research grants from big foundations, and the closest things they get (funding from a publisher) have strings attached. Practicality is key. I admit this is somewhat of a jaded view, but it is better in this particular situation to take this view.

TL;DR (yet again, l2 shorten your posts cubed): It's too expensive and time is money.

Also, I like how the last 2 pages and all of the wall of texts can be summed up as this:

Madface: Optimize engine with made up functions and multicore derping!
The rest: It's too expensive.

Madface: Optimize engine with made up functions and multicore derping!
The rest: It's too expensive.

Madface: Optimize engine with made up functions and multicore derping!
The rest: It's too expensive.

Repeat ad infimum.

I could shorten my posts into biting, offensive statements, but madface would go on a rant about how we are immature and inferior to him and not contributing anything to this discussion. So since this discussion is going nowhere (due wholly to madface), let us make the most of it with a duel of prose.

Or a mod could just lock this thread and be done with it.

I would appreciate both.