Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.
Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.
Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.
Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.
I mean, the demo for Rollercoaster Tycoon (Mr. "Hand coded in assembly" there) bricked our Windows 98 machine when i installed it as a kid. My dad was pissed: we had to reformat the harddrive, reinstall windows, all that.
Yeah I remember the specific clock speed thing! I had a game that I loved on a friend's computer and didn't get to play it much. Some sort of space sim / combat game. Years later I had my own much more powerful machine and was hyped to check it out. Installed via dosbox or whatever, loaded it up, and it ran at fucking 10x speed! It took seconds to walk around a city and the combat was completely unplayable. So sad but also pretty funny. No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware. If you want an easier game, just get a worse computer apparently.
No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware.
It's the most trivial and straight forward thing to do. The game is a simple loop of:
get user input (can be nothing)
calculate new game state based on old state and input
draw new game state.
The speed of the game is now 100% dependant on the speed of computation.
NOT attaching fps to hardware is the hard thing, as you need to detach the game state loop and the drawing loop and then synchronize them. Doing that yourself is extremely complicated. Today developers don't even need to think about that because the whole drawing loop is abstracted away by things like directX/Vulcan and the game engine. But without those tools, fps tied to CPU speed is basically the default.
And in fairness a lot of microcomputers at the time were closed specs. Even on PC for a while you were theoretically aiming at a 4Mhz XT or, at worst, also wanted to account for a 8MHz AT. By the time IBM clones had become... you know, just PCs, a lot of devs either didn't get the memo or chose to ignore it for the reasons you list.
Most of the time "lazy devs" are just "overworked and underfunded devs", but the point is, that didn't start this century.
Also games have gotten way more complicated since the gameboy colour era. I've coded a basic 2D physics engine from scratch (literally just circles with soft collisions) and its not just enough to set up the vector math correctly. You can literally make a true to real life physics model (as far as the math of infinitely rigid perfect spheres on a perfectly flat plane goes anyway) and have all sorts of problems crop up because computers aren't the universe and order of computation is a bitch.
Even the first Dark Souls had game ticks tied to the FPS because consoles had been standardized to 30 FPS for decades.
On the PC port, it was locked to 30 FPS, but a super popular mod unlocked the FPS, and at 60 FPS DoT effects ticked twice as fast, and at even higher FPS could kill you before you had time to react.
Hah. In fairness, sound cards weren't "minimum requirements". It's just that depending on the hardware you had the game would just have a completely different soundtrack, 75% of which sounded completely broken. If you were lucky the "minimum spec" was silence. If you were unlucky it was making your beeper sound like somebody had tripped a car alarm.
People these days are out there emulating Roland MT-32s on Raspberry Pis. I didn't have a sound card until the Pentium era. Every DOS game in my memory sounds like a Furby got a bad case of hiccups.
I leave this as an example, but please understand this is the absolute best case scenario. Michael Land and the rest of the Lucas guys were wizards and actually cared to tune things for multiple options, including really impressive beeper music.
I have heard the difference of sound cards before in a video explaining it, but it is still just a wild too me to hear it, and nearly a bit difficult to imagine it actually being that way. Like I KNOW it was how sound on computers was at that time, but it is still hard to imagine my games sounding so completely differently depending on what pc I play it on.
I have the opposite problem, where I have to remind myself that a lot of people making these memes just don't have a frame of reference for any of this. I'm used to having been there for the vast majority of home computing, it's so hard for me to parse having been born with computers just mostly working the way they do now.
I can somewhat comprehens the difference in appearance and sometimes game play, but at the same time not really. I have seen the same game be different on pc vs console and a third version on handheld, and while I know this where all computers, I still very much think of them in the way of game consoles you could also do computer things on, even though I know that they were computers that you could play games on.
I blame it a bit on terminology, every time I hear about old computers, they are always referred to much more similar to how we refer to games consoles today then we do with computers. It is an Amiga 500, Amiga 1000 or an Atari 7800 or Atari ST. That is much more similar in my head to like Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 4.
I have never really heard computers be referred to in that manner now a days, they probably are to some extent in some circles, but I have completely managed to miss them, and I do have some interested in computers. Like I can tell you I have owned a Dell, a HP and a Lenovo amongst some, but I would really have to do some digging to maybe be able to tell what version of them it was.
I know my current one start with G and the following looks some what like lam, but I only know that because it kinda looked like Glam so I named it that and because I have needed to Google that exact model, to look up some stuff.
I can however understand how you feel having grown up with with the computers and now talking to and interacting with a lot of people that never experience the older ones. Realising that people have a completely different fram of reference to something is a very weird thing to experience and somewhat difficult to navigate.
I am however happy that you and other people do have different experiences as then I could learn about how sound cards made games sound completely different or how changing GPU or computers manufacturer could completely change the game.
Man I loved the hell out of my SB16. I still play a lot of old DOS games in emulation and work pretty hard to get them to sound like I remember vs the higher fidelity versions.
It was the first time I played it and found the combat frustratingly difficult because of the increased speed. Especially in dungeons where I had to bait enemies one by one just to not get overwhelmed. One hand was always holding a healing spell as well.
At my buddy's house, he had a game called something like 'wings of glory' that was meant for an older clock speed. We were messing with the turbo button and it quickly became unplayable when not in the slower mode.
If you try it again, emulators like dosbox let you slow the game down to be playable. I don’t remember the exact setting but I’ve had to do it on things like Freddy Farkas iirc.
Right. That was common, too. Games were tiny and very expensive, so broken balance was often used to pad out length. And yeah, it got crazy once Americans started popularizing rental and publishers got desperate to make the games less economical to beat without purchasing them.
I did finish Ecco 1 legit, though. Once.
I've tried the last couple of stages a few times. I still don't understand how tween me managed that. Even on a CRT with original hardware and zero lag that's a stupid thing to try to do.
Bigger was better, since a larger game meant they packed in more content. Now the bloat is out of control since all game content is delivered over the Internet.
Bloat is out of control because games are HUGE and you can often trade size for performance if you have enough memory to do so.
Also, memory used to be extremely expensive, especially catridge ROMs. Outside of the Switch this is less of a concern now, that's true, but the tradeoff is you get to have pin-sharp high resolution assets and tons of performance optimizations instead of... you know, just chopping enough frames of animation to fit your sprites in 16 megabits then charge a hundred bucks for the extra-sized cart. You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now for the money it used to cost to buy a single game shipped on a cartridge.
The hard drive I had to wipe from the OS, as I mentioned above was a whole 20 gig. 386-ish era. It seemed so huge when I got it (and so expensive) and by the time that PC was done it was... well, a "wipe to OS to fit stuff in" drive.
But that's not necessarily the point, the more relevant thing is how big things are relative to storage and how cheap it is to upgrade storage. It's true that storage sizes and prices plateaued for a while, so a bunch of people are still running on 1-2 TB while the games got into the hundreds of GB. But still, storage had gotten so proportionately cheap before then, and very fast storage is so overkill now. A 1TB Gen 3 NVMe is 75 bucks, and most games will run fine on it, Sony propaganda notwithstanding.
You can fit loads of x360-ps3 era games in the same space CoD warzone takes. The irony is that, for PC players with lower specs, that's a lot of wasted storage, since they'll never use/load the higher res textures.
You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now
That line of thinking is what leads to extreme, unnecessary bloat. "Just buy more storage, brah"
You can absolutely do that. You can also fit 16 frames of the Xbox 360 game into a single frame of the Xbox Series X game.
Sometimes people forget how much bigger a 4K target is compared to a 720p image, so I added a bit of a visual aid below. Those two screenshots are to scale, displayed at the native resolutions of their respective platforms. Just keep in mind that the big one is from a 1440p 21:9 monitor, so on a 4K TV the picture would have two of those stacked on top of each other.
It's good that this is smaller, because If you squint you can also notice the Xbox 360 game is extremely blurry and looks like it's in black and white. That's because it is. The 360 had 512megs of ram, to share between the CPU and the GPU. The Xbox Series X has 16 gigs, so 32 times more, and it's running a cool 300 times faster. 360 games were compressing textures within an inch of their lives to fit them into that tiny slab of memory, stripping color data among other things.
Computers are not magic. If you want to draw 15 million pixels of a wall and not have it look like soup you need data for each of those pixels. If you want that data to fit in less space you have to either spend resources compressing and decompressing it or you need more storage to put it in. Or you can draw it procedurally, I guess, but then you're back to the performance problem.
On the other thing, it's not "just buy more storage, brah", it's that storage has to ramp linearly with memory. If you are trying to build huge worlds running at hundreds of frames and streaming data at gigabytes per second out of a SSD you're going to need to put those assets somewhere. The problem isn't (just) that games are big, it's that the ability to move those big assets has grown a bit faster than the ability to make cheaper, faster storage for the same price.
Games aren't big because developers are lazy, they're big because physics and engineering are hard and not every piece of technology improves at the same rate. But hey, on the plus side, storage HAS gotten cheaper. By the end of its life the PS3 was shipping 500 GB. The PS5 and Xbox Series ship 32 times more ram but only 1.5 to 2x more storage because storage is where everybody is skimping to contain costs. That's not commensurate with the increase of visual fidelity or asset size, but at least you can add more for relatively little money, especially on PC.
EDIT: Sorry, this client didn't like the picture going in. Link to an example below from a random image hosting site. Follow it at your peril, I make no claims about its safety. https://ibb.co/Ss7RfzW
I remember reading an early-2000s book on game dev. It did mention that some game (I want to say one of the Unreal games, but I can't recall for sure) had to code their level loading in assembler because it was taking upwards of 10 minutes in C++.
Yeah, I definitely think the OP has super rose-colored glasses on. The free shareware was pretty awesome, though. I had one called "80 mega-hits" or something like that with a ton of games (many of which my poor old PC couldn't run).
I do think that optimization has slacked off more as hardware prices generally trended down. Disk space I don't so much mind, but memory and CPU are still expensive.
The "free shareware" thing is kind of back. I've been noticing more and more games producing demos; check out Steam Next fest, for example.
I also remember playing a ton of games from a CD. I had a Mac at the time, but it was "dos compatible", which meant it had a 486 in addition to the Mac processor at the time, so you could switch over into dos, though you could only allocate half the ram to it.
We ended up installing Windows 95 to play a lot of the games, which ran great on the available 4 MB of RAM.
This is one of those things where I'm not sure what people mean when they say it.
There are bugs that affect performance, and yeah, we're generally more likely to see bugs fro several reasons now. But there's also games just being heavy. We're not in a cycle where the top of the line hardware just maxes out many games, because... well, we're doing real time path-tracing, we have monitors that go up to 400 Hz and resolutions up to 4K. The times of "set it to Ultra and forget about it" with a 1080 are gone and not coming back for a really long time. Plus everything has to scale wider now, because on the other end we have actual handhelds now, which is nuts.
So yeah, I'm not sure which one people are complaining about these days. I'll say that if you can play a game in a handheld PC and then crank it up to look like an offline rendered path traced movie that's way more thought to scalability than older games ever had, but maybe that's a slightly different conversation.
Oh, that's a whole other subject. "Old games were so polished and fully finished". Meanwhile, half of the planet was either playing games squished down, in slow motion or both. And most of them didn't even know.
It's not as simple as that, either. May people think all games ran 15% slower. Many games did have some retiming somewhere, but it was definitely not great and people didn't complain because with no internet, they often didn't realize what was going on.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished.
I remember doing this Battle of Britain and TIE Fighter! Man, memories.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you'd mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you'd need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB
I think I came along around 2 years after burners were commercially available, so I never saw that. And the 700 MB discs came along very shortly later. So I never had a concept of a 550 MB CD (btw you said 500 MB). This is the first I've heard of it.
It did exist, I promise. But again, I just default to 500 because it was such common shorthand to think about it in terms of needing two discs to store a gig. And to this day I still have 650 CDs laying around, even when 700MB ones were available they were both around at once.
I think some of the mismatch may also be that you're thinking about it in terms of storage only (i.e. CD-Rs) because of your age and I'm probably a bit older and was mostly talking about them as read-only media. It was years between the first CDs in the late 80s and writers being widespread at all, assuming whatever game or application that came in a single CD was going to take 500 meg-ish to duplicate or install was, again, pretty useful.
In any case, this is obsolete trivia. The point is we went from games being tens of megs to hundreds of megs overnight, and we were all extremely pleased about it.
You are half right. I am misremembering 63min being the original standard of the red book audio CD, that was 650 already, although apparently 63 min CDs were used for audio mastering at some point? Info about that is sparse. As a side note, man, modern search engines suuuck.
Anyway, 63min/550MB was the low capacity standard of the CD-R instead.
And also this, from a eBay auction selling a box and labelling them "incredibly rare", which apparently is accurate. I came just shy of digging through my pile of old CDs to see if I have any left. I may still do that next time I have them on hand.
That and it easily running on Linux, either naively or though Proton, is why I haven't touched any AAA in like... at least 5 years? Maybe closer to 10.
groomerwojak.jpg: "I groomed a teen fan of mine, and when she came forward I made her to write an apology, also I spent my Patreon money on a sexdoll, and my code is spaghetti."
"We barely managed to make a functioning game with premade assets, and our popularity was so dependent on Pokémon not performing well, our fanbase is a toxic cesspool as a result, who can't express the love to the game without actively dissing Nintendo."
"I'm a bigoted con artist who rebrands every time they get busted for his crappy horror game."
"Optimization? We are already using low-poly assets!"
"The assets in our pixelart games are very unaligned, and we use high-resolution fonts because no one makes bitmap fonts anymore."
If you donate money to develop a vaccine against something, much of that money will go towards the salaries of researchers to pay for their work. Some of them may buy sex dolls, dildos, satisfyers or chastity belts with some of that money, because they have rightfully earned it, and the money you paid was still used to develop that vaccine.
I mean nobody said all indie devs were great, i just think that if you want to find examples of good game development today you're largely going to find the stars are indie, not triple A
Why are you twisting things around? It's Nintendo fans that won't shut up about plagiarism to the point that the The Pokémon Company told everyone that they know, stop sending emails about it.
But only for today. The concept of triple A didn't really exist back then, and at least one of the "then" game devs was totally indie for the game he made
Tbf, games were easier to create using in-game functions and logic that was created for another game. Modding a whole rework was easier than making the entire game from scratch. Undeniably lethal company is similar in look and feel but it has better game play than some mods.
Is your point that developers today aren't as good/benevolent/whatever as devs back in the day? I'm saying (sarcastically, I suppose) that the same type of developers exist today. What does survivor's bias have to do with it? Is my point moot because GMOD exists?
Your point is moot because there is an unending hose of indie games being created and knowing that 2 gems exist doesn't mean the rest of the cottage industry measures up to the things being achieved earlier, and nor does said indie scene have a similar rate of success as the old industry back then.
it's survivor bias because having one or two good games in a tidal wave of indie bug riddled, knockoff messes isn't exactly the same thing as the innovations from back in the day. Some asshole's Amnesia knockoff or twin stick shooter being good is hardly surprinsing when 5000 of them come out daily.
To be fair, game devs did the hackiest shit to deal with the constraints of the time. They did things that no programmer would do today because they're bad practices when you're not worried about tiny amounts of RAM or storage.
I love watching videos about old game systems programming. The gymnastics you had to do to code, like, super Mario, just to show more than 3 colors is really interesting.
People who think modern coding practices are bloated should study why certain speed running mechanics work. A lot of them stem from things we would never do today. We've removed entire classes of bugs by using "bloated" languages and tools.
Dude livestreamed Super Mario 64 for more than a month with a bot attached that perfectly abused a physics quirk based on floating point precision, just so he can crash the game at 0:00 at New Year's by overflowing a value. This over-one-hour-long video is the summary.
If you haven't seen them, look up the Ultimate talk on YouTube. They go into real depth on c64, Gameboy, Atari, Amiga, etc. development and all the tricks that are used.
The games then were closer to embedded dev than software dev. The cartridge had huge limitations and the devs had to know those limits and work around them.
Cartridges were also full on daughter boards instead of just an older version of SD cards. There were massive differences between games. The later SNES games with 3d graphics had a whole extra processor included in the cart.
The old Super FX chip. I'm old enough to remember when they released the original Star Fox and flogged the super onboard 3d processing. The ads in comic books mentioned it by name.
2d games did, too. The SA1 chip did a lot to make games run better on the SNES. There's mods out there for running games on the SA1 chip, especially shooters like Super R-Type, and it's a substantially better experience.
Sometimes they did it just in case they needed those limited resources, but its not really needed. SMW is a good example, where spite interactions are only checked every other frame, but modders generally remove that limitation without any issues. There might be weird edge cases where in vanilla without glitches you could theoretically accumulate enough sprite on stream it causes a slightly more noticeable slowdown without the ever other frame. With cape float, it only checks if you are holding the jump button once every 4 frames or something like that. Totally unnecessary and makes the game feel less responsive. Granted, during a casual playthrough, you'd probably never notice that floating stopping after letting go of the button varies by 50ms depending on which frame you let go of the button relative to which frame it checks.
We can’t update games or refactor code to make it smaller bc our bosses demand we constantly work harder, better, faster, stronger. They force us into games that require more expensive hardware bc the entire tech industry depends on people upgrading every other year. And it’s online constantly bc we hoover up player data for our new profit centre where we sell all your data.
And now they made a meme that deflects blame off them and onto devs, who have way more contact w the public than anonymous rich people
Enshittification is just another name for the type of capitalism America practices.
Everything gets worse because it's not profitable to stay good when there are only 147 umbrella corps worldwide. Capitalism doesn't reward innovation in products when monopolies exist, it rewards innovations in minutiae of existing products.
See also: DLC, Premium Passes, Microtransactions, Seasonal Content, Free-to-Play*, Ads in AAA tier games and everywhere else, Subscriptions, and every other shitty innovation the market (no not consumers, shareholders) rewards.
That's to say nothing of how these companies extract the value of their employees labor and then lay them off to keep turnover at whatver level the coke addicts in the c-suite have determined is best. Crunchtime, harrassment, fuck man look at Bobby fucking Kotnick and his blizzard shitshow.
Qhile that is true the effects of it were lesser since it was more niche. Plus some of the best games are still in their own weird niche, ive been playing STALKER GAMMA which is a free modpack for a free mod, and help I am being consumed! I DREAM OF REPAIR KITS AND GUN ANIMATION, HNNNNNNGH KILL MONOLITH!
That's just being intellectually dishonest in the opposite direction.
The truth is some things do get worse, some things get better, and in either case, the right thing to do is examine the tangible effects, positive or negative.
Everyone seems to think that games like Doom and Half-Life came out all the time. I remember looking at shareware disks in shops and seeing loads of games that looked like total crap.
For sure! just go to Abandonware and try to go to a specific year to find something. You have to wade through pages of garbo to find something worth playing.
One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was digging through the "1000s of Games" disc I had that was full of demos, shovelware, Doom mods, and tons of other garbage. Occasionally you'd find a diamond hidden in the turds.
There's even a Youtuber who does "Shovelware Diggers" as a show and it's just that! Him and his community riffle around in old shareware collections looking for treasures, which he showcases. (Edit to add: Looked it up and he ended the show after 300 episodes! He still does other retro gaming stuff too. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCIZNtotF3Xh0dfQjJx8XcP_73UGtjqN0&si=Gvx5W0mmjTE48z79 )
But yeah, most of the content on those discs would have qualified more as viruses than games, if they even ran in the first place!
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 1999, so I'll choose to believe that the "then" era was after the big gaming crash of the 80s. There was still shovelware, but it wasn't nearly as bad as during the 80s when you'd see mountains and mountains of terrible, non-functioning games. I don't think anyone really has nostalgia for that period of gaming, but the late 90s to early 2000s really were as close to a golden age as we ever got.
Gaming crash was more of a console thing. One of the arguments was why you should buy a console when you can buy a computer for a bit more and do so much more. Computer games ran through it mostly unfazed.
I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.
I played some pretty good games on the 48k spectrum back in the day. My first computer was a zx81 with 1k ram, it was a bit challenging to do anything interesting with it - but people still wrote games for the thing.
While true that it's impressive, now games have to be made to work on variable screen sizes with different input controllers, key mappings, configurations, more operating systems, with more features than ever. It's an absolute explosion of complexity.
Even making a 2D game for today's hardware is more difficult than making a 2D game for Gameboy.
Honest question, is that true? It's my understanding that developing a 2D game today would be a simpler task than for a system from the 90s due to so many improvements in development software.
You realize it's not devs that make those decisions, right? It's publishers and execs. You know, the guys who make the actual money in all this. Stop blaming devs for stupid exec decisions.
Meh, it depends on which of the issues you're flagging. Games are large for understandable reasons, both technical and practical. The optimization problem is... complicated, and my thoughts on it get really into the weeds, but it's not as simple as people would think. And I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the "can't fix our game" panel, because at best it makes no sense.
The always-online thing is maybe the most controversial, and you'd definitely find the most developers who agree with you on that unconditionally. But also, tons of offline games get made on all types of scopes.
Also, devs stick around for it. They aren't providing an essential service, like sticking around as a nurse in a poorly run hospital...they are creating a novelty.
They are technical knowledge workers and hold very privileged credentials in western markets.
To be clear I'm not excusing corporate policy and such, but the same way technical engineers at oil companies are complicit in accelerated climate change, devs at shitty companies are complicit in shitty game products.
I never worked for big bad companies but even the "green, progressive" ones wore me down eventually, there just aren't any companies in the modern world over a certain size that aren't scummy one way or another. That's why I only work for myself now.
I almost worked in NGO but it didn't work out in the end, I could still be curious to check that out at some point.
No, it's a fucking stupid comparison, man. One thing leads to dead people, the other thing leads to slightly less convenient entertainment software. Can you figure out the rest for yourself? Fuck all the way off with your "questionable orders".
I expressed how your comparison is stupid. I'm sorry if you perceive that as hostile and think you need to get a point in by making up an equally stupid scenario about my marriage. Obviously I hit a nerve. Can't say the same about your shitty attempt at an insult.
Very rose tinted glasses. I remember horrifying cache corruption bugs that locked you out of certain game areas permanently on that save, random illegal operation exceptions crashing games (no autosave btw), the whole system regularly freezing and needing to be completely restarted, games just inexplicably not working to begin with on a regular basis because of some hardware incompatibility and the internet sucked for finding fixes then and patches weren't a thing so you were just screwed.
I would say that games not all being written in C and assembly trying to squeeze out every possible performance efficiency with nothing but dev machismo as safeguards is in fact a good thing.
Yes, but they are made by different people and all those bugs have been worked out over time. The people actually making the games are doing so at a higher level with more safeguards and it shows.
I've been using zoho notes on my phone for a long time now. It started out really good, but somehow has become so bloated that it's laggy. It's PLAIN TEXT. How do you make that lag??
Which one? Obsidian for desktop is 400MB, but it lets you make knowledge trees and includes a zotero extension. Although maybe it doesn’t need to be 400MB.
For those that are unaware, the second chad is most likely referring to .kkrieger. Not a full game, but a demo (from a demoscene) whose purpose was to make a fully playable game with a max size of 96kb. Even going very slow, you won't need more than 5 minutes to finish it.
The startup is very CPU heavy and takes a while, even on modern systems, because it generates all the geometry, textures, lighting and whatnot from stored procedures.
Pretty sure it's on the devs for making the buggy games though. IIRC, ET is unbeatable without cheating or playing a patched version. It's far from the only one with problems.
Pretty sure it’s on the devs for making the buggy games though.
"Hi, you have 5 weeks to make a game based on this IP because we HAVE to ship for christmas." - No way in hell anything remotely decent would've come out from 35 days of work.
There was a period of time when a massive influx of shovelware was released. Think stuff like the ET game. No one wanted to buy it, and the industry almost became a bust. Nintendo came in and almost single handedly revived the entire industry by releasing novel, high quality games like donkey kong. This is why Nintendo is a modern household name and why you mostly see atari in museums.
Also the Atari name/trademark/copyright got sold, and mergered about a dozen times. The current owners bear basically no relation to the original game company.
I wasn't exactly old enough to have experienced this, but I know there was a time that if you wanted to play a PC game, you didn't buy it on a floppy or a disc; you got a book with code that you had to type up and compile yourself. If you did more than just follow the book, you could understand it and change it to be whatever you wanted!
This is why I wish everything was open source. If I don't like the way something is done, I can tweak it. Any part of it and make it perfect for me.
The closest I got was learning that the TI-85 I used in my algebra classes had BASIC programming in it, and I found the code for a rogulike dungeon crawler kinda like Eye of the Beholder specifically for the calculator. At the time, I already knew plenty of BASIC myself so I could tweak things as I found bugs or generally didn't like the stats of an item.
You can go to GOG, buy some really old game, install it on a PC, play it and after a few minutes go:
"How the fk was I so dazzled with this shit back then?!"
At least for me, whilst most such game were A LOT of fun back then, almost all of them feel kinda meh nowadays, the graphics-heavy ones because they look like shit now compared to even games from 10 year ago and the other ones because their game mechanics are so shallow and simplistic (and often oh so reliant on reaction times) compared to even what Indie companies have been doing in the last couple of decades.
Yeah, the memory of the fun that was had survived the passage of time, but most of those games pale in comparisson to games I've played in the last 2 decades. Beware of confusing the two like the sterotypical old person who complains "Music was much better when I was young, before Rock-n-Roll".
PS: I'm not even especially big on fancy graphics but instead prefer complex multi-layered game mechanics, so the kind of games from back then I still can enjoy today are things like Civilization.
“How the fk was I so dazzled with this shit back then?!”
Lack of games to compare to, mostly. For instance, how many games could you compare Warcraft to, back in 1994? Probably only Dune II. By 1999, any RTS game would be compared to Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation and possibly others. "Doom clone" remained the definition of FPS for roughly 3 years. Meanwhile, every platformer since the late 80s was compared to half the catalogue available on the NES. Something something "learning from others' mistakes, standing on the shoulders of giants"
Not every old game is a gem, just like not every modern game is trash. One of my personal old favorites that holds up well is Jedi Outcast. Does a better job at making you feel like a lightsaber wielding jedi than Force Unleashed
I'm not talking about comparison to modern expectation; I'm saying that devs were scrappier, had less established frameworks of design and technology, and still created a beautiful cultural moment
Mind you, the biggest hindrance the create something special back then was technical, nowadays it's time: codebases are far more massive nowadays and the work that goes into making assets (sprites, models, audio, animation and so on) that go with the code in a modern game is gigantic compared to back then (or, alternativelly, if done with reusable assets you get just another of hundred of similar-loooking low-buget indie games).
Even something like Bioshock with it's unique vision was already a massive piece of work when it comes to game assets, though artistically (and as a game too) it's a masterpiece, IMHO.
I actually made a handfull of games back in the early 90s (a minesweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum done in Assembly and never published, and a Tic-Tac-Toe game for the PC done in C that I sold to a small magazine and did got published) and then started working on game making a few years ago, and definitelly the programing work has expanded in terms of size (with still some down-to-the-metal technically complex stuff like shader programming) but the asset creation work has massivelly exploded (no wonder AAA games have bugets in the hundreds of millions of dollars range).
I see stuff like this and I don't blame developers/coders for all the shit that's happening. If you objectively look at gameplay and such, most games are actually pretty decent on their own. The graphics are usually really nice and the story is adequate, if not quite good, the controls are sensible and responsive...
A lot of the major complaints about modern games isn't necessarily what the devs are making, it's more about what the garbage company demands is done as part of the whole thing. Online only single player is entirely about control, keeping you from pirating the game (or at least trying to) plus supplying on you and serving you ads and such... Bad releases are because stuff gets pushed out the door before it's ready because the company needs more numbers for their profit reports, so things that haven't been given enough time and need more work get pushed onto paying customers. Day one patches are normal because between the time they seed the game to distributors like valve and Microsoft and stuff, and the time the game unlocks for launch day, stuff is still being actively worked on and fixed.
The large game studios have turned the whole thing into a meat grinder to just pump money out of their customers as much as possible and as often as possible, and they've basically ruined a lot of the simple expectations for game releases, like having a game that works and that performs adequately and doesn't crash or need huge extras (like updates) to work on day 1....
Developers themselves aren't the problem. Studios are the problem and they keep consolidating into a horrible mass of consumer hostile policies.
"The inverse square root function in the C math library isn't fast enough. That's okay, I'll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster."
I hate this conflation of "Developer" with every other role in modern game development.
If you think the new Porsche looks shit, do you blame the Mecanical engineer who designed the brake mechanism?
If your new manga body pillow gives you a rash, do you blame the graphic designer of the manga?
There is not a single thing listed in the meme above that is actually the fault of the actual developers working on the game.
Don't even need to talk about the first picture.
game size is studio management related. They want to stuff as much (repetitive, boring) content into the game as possible. Plus a multiplayer mode no one asked for.
Optimizations don't happen because the CEO decides to take the sales money of the game this quarter, and not next, and ships an unfinished product.
Always online is ALWAYS a management decision.
It's a shit joke, it's wrong because it blames the wrong people, and its also just dumb.
Besides being a maintenance fucking nightmare, wouldn't writing a game in assembly make it a lot harder to be cross platform? I really don't get that panel.
Yes, yes it would. They meant to say that it would improve performance (if done well, which it was). That improved performance would allow it to run on a wide variety of devices, including those with low specs.
Also at the time writing for x86 only would have been plenty portable. Even today that would cover "standard" PC architecture. (Although nowadays you probably want to put it on mobile devices, gaming consoles or macOS, so not ideal.)
Yeah, it being about performance makes sense. Still don't know how that dude managed to write a full-ass game in assembly though. Takes a special brain to even be able to think that way.
That idea comes from the tycoon games because they run on newer windows versions easily. But it's not because they were made in assembly. Any programming language can do that as long as the program doesn't depend on specific OS features that get changed or removed. I think assembly is just synonymous with everything being from scratch.
I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.
Yeah exactly. Apparently they meant "most machines" as in "most machines that could run windows". Like in a performance sense. Weird way to put it imo, since "most machines" to me would refer to platform concerns.
games made with agile teams and with passions are probably good, regardless of when they were made. i'm young but growing up i only had access to really old computers and saw that most of the stuff that was made back in the day was just garbage shovelware. it was hard not to get buried in them.
most triple A developers today are far more skilled in both writing and optimizing the code however when the management is forcing you to work long hours you're gonna make more mistakes and with tight deadlines, if you're doing testing and bug fixing after developing the entire game then it's going to be the first thing that's getting cut.
that being said i wish they really did something about the massive size games take on disk. my screen is 1080p, my hardware can barely handle your game on low in 1080p so everything is gonna get downscaled regardless and despite how hard you wanna ignore it data caps are still here, why am i forced to get all assets and textures in 4k 8k? make it optional goddamit.
AAA games are turning into luxury/super cars. At the top end, they're just not made for average consumers anymore where you need money for infrastructure to even drive the thing. But then you also have plenty of Indie/AA studios creating games that surpass AAA from 10-15 years ago with much smaller teams cause tools and skills make it feasible. Of course there's also the starcrafts and the counterstrikes that are over 20 years old and will never die, the Toyota Camrys and Honda Civics of games, they just get perpetually refreshed
Ok, that got me. I still remember the days of ZX and that funny noise...
But I do have a question for one part of the meme: can someone explain to me why on Earth the updates now weigh these tens of gigs?
I can accept that hires textures and other assets can take that space, but these are most likely not the bits that are being updated most of the time.
Why don't devs just take the code they actually update and send that our way?
I am perfectly fine with paying developers, as I buy only the games i do like after some testing )
Going the repack route is unpredictable - no updates, may contain whatever viruses repacker is interested in adding (and given the particular one is likely Russian, I do have my reservations at this crazy time...), etc.
I mean, I understand when they chuck everything into a single file, but they used to know how to make their updaters unpack and replace only the stuff that needed updating, instead of just throwing the whole fucking file at you, redundancy be damned.
For instance, stuff in Quake 3 engine is kept in .pk3 files. You don't need to download the full, newest .pk3, you send a command to remove/replace files X, Y and Z within it and call it a day.
Yeah but then people go completely ballistic when games require you to install their own launches I don't think Steam would necessarily be able to handle the myriad of different formats that would be needed to make that work. So either you have custom lunches or you don't have particularly efficient patches.
That's because games don't need "their own launcher" to apply updates like that. Ask anyone that's been playing on PC, patches were these self extracting files or "mini installers" that you just needed to point to the installed game's folder. Even vanilla World of Warcraft let people download the patches for offline install, it even included a text with all the changes applied.
People don't want the fiddling on of that. I just want to be able to install the patch and then it be there.
That's why lunches are a thing there's no other reason to have them.
You might enjoy the technical solution but 99% of people don't care. I never understand why people seem to think that the 1% of the most experienced people are the standard when they are anything but. Most gamers build their own PCs, they don't want to have to understand about file systems and formats and compiling. They just wanted to work and then they want to play their game.
For modern games, from what I've seen, they've taken a more modular approach to how assets are saved. So you'll have large data files which are essentially full of compressed textures or something. Depending on how many textures you're using and how many versions of each textures is available (for different detail levels), it can be a lot of assets, even if all the assets in this file, are all wall textures, as an example.
So the problem becomes that the updaters/installers are not complex enough to update a single texture file in a single compressed texture dataset file. So the solution is to instead, replace the entire dataset with one that contains the new information. So while you're adding an item or changing how something looks, you're basically sending not only the item, but also all similar items (all in the same set) again, even though 90% didn't change. The files can easily reach into the 10s of gigabytes in size due to how many assets are needed. Adding a map? Dataset file for all maps needs to be sent. Adding a weapon or changing the look/feel/animation of a weapon? Here's the entire weapon dataset again.
Though not nearly as horrible, the same can be said for the libraries and executable binaries of the game logic. This variable was added, well, here's that entire binary file with the change (not just the change). Binaries tend to be a lot smaller than the assets so it's less problematic.
The entirety of the game content is likely stored in a handful (maybe a few dozen at most) dataset files, so if any one of them change for any reason, end users now need to download 5-10% of the installed size of the game, to get the update.
Is there a better way? Probably. But it may be too complex to accomplish. Basically write a small patching program to unpack the dataset, replace/insert the new assets, then repack it. It would reduce the download size, but increase the amount of work the end user system needs to do for the update, which may or may not be viable depending on the system you've made the game for. PC games should support it, but what happens if you're coding across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo switch? Do those consoles allow your game the read/write access they need to the storage to do the unpacking and repacking? Do they have the space for that?
It becomes a risk, and doing it the way they are now, if you have enough room to download the update, then no more space is needed, since the update manager will simply copy the updated dataset entirely, over the old one.
It's a game of choices and variables, risks and rewards. Developers definitely don't want to get into the business of custom updates per platform based on capabilities, so you have to find a solution that works for everyone who might be running the game. The current solution wastes bandwidth, but has the merit of being cross compatible, and consistent. The process is the same for every platform.
The console argument does actually make a lot of sense to me, thank you for the detailed response. It would still (seemingly) be possible to structure the project in a way that would allow replacing only what you actually need to replace, but that requires more investment in the architecture and likely cause more errors due to added complexity.
Still, i cannot forgive the BG 3 coders for making me redownload these 120gb or so! )
The issue is the compression. There's hundreds of individual assets, the process to compress or more accurately, uncompress the assets for use takes processor resources. Usually it only really needs to be done a few times when the game starts, when it loads the assets required. Basically when you get to a loading screen, the game is unpacking the relevant assets from those dataset files. Every time the game opens one of those datasets, it takes time to create the connection to the dataset file on the host system, then unpack the index of the dataset, and finally go and retrieve the assets needed.
Two things about this process: first, securing access to the file and getting the index is a fairly slow process. Allocating anything takes significant time (relative to the other steps in the process) and accomplishes nothing except preparing to load the relevant assets. It's basically just wasted time. The second thing is that compressed files are most efficient in making the total size smaller when there's more data in the file.
Very basically, the most simple compression, zip (aka "compressed folders" in Windows) basically looks through the files for repeating sections of data, it then replaces all that repeated content with a reference to the original data. The reference is much smaller than the data it replaces. This can also be referred to as de-duplication. In this way if you had a set of files that all contained mostly the same data, say text files with most of the same repeating messages, the resulting compression would be very high (smaller size) and this method is used for things like log files since there are many repeating dates, times, and messages with a few unique variances from line to line. This is an extremely basic concept of one style of compression that's very common, and certainly not the only way, and also not necessarily the method being used, or the only method being used.
If there's less content per compressed dataset file, there's going to be fewer opportunities for the compression to optimize the content to be smaller, so large similar datasets are preferable over smaller ones containing more diverse data.
This, combined with the relatively long open times per file means that programmers will want as few datasets as possible to keep the system from needing to open many files to retrieve the required data during load times, and to boost the efficiency of those compressed files to optimal levels.
If, for example, many smaller files were used, then yes, updates would be smaller. However, loading times could end up being doubled or tripled from their current timing. Given that you would, in theory, be leading data many times over (every time you load into a game or a map or something), compared to how frequently you perform updates, the right choice is to have updates take longer with more data required for download, so when you get into the game, your intra-session loads may be much faster.
With the integration of solid state storage in most modern systems, loading times have also been dramatically reduced due to the sheer speed at which files can be locked, opened, and data streamed out of them into working memory, but it's still a trade-off that needs to be taken into account. This is especially true when considering releases on PC, since PC's can have wildly different hardware and not everyone is using SSDs, or similar (fast) flash storage; perhaps on older systems or if the end user simply prefers the less expensive space available from spinning platter hard disks.
All of this must be counter balanced to provide the best possible experience for the end user and I assure you that all aspects of this process are heavily scrutinized by the people who designed the game. Often, these decisions are made early on so that the rest of the loading system can be designed around these concepts consistently, and it doesn't need to be reworked part way through the lifecycle of the game. It's very likely that even as systems and standards change, the loading system in the game will not, so if the game was designed with optimizations for hard disks (not SSDs) in mind, then that will not change until at least the next major release in that games franchise.
What isn't really excusable is when the next game from a franchise has a large overhaul, and the loading system (with all of its obsolete optimizations) is used for more modern titles; which is something I'm certain happens with most AAA studios. They reuse a lot of the existing systems and code to reduce how much work is required to go from concept to release, and hopefully shorten the duration of time (and the amount of effort required) to get to launch. Such systems should be under scrutiny at all times whenever possible, to further streamline the process and optimize it for the majority of players. If that means outlier customers trying to play the latest game on their WD green spinning disk have a worse time because they haven't purchased an SSD, when more than 90% + have at least a SATA SSD, all of whom get the benefits from the newer load system while obsolete users are detrimented because of their slow platter drives, then so be it.
But I'm starting to cross over into my opinions on it a bit more than I intended to. So I'll stop there. I hope that helps at least make sense of what's happening and why such decisions are made. As always if anyone reads this and knows more than I do, please speak up and correct me. I'm just some guy on the internet, and I'm not perfect. I don't make games, I'm not a developer. I am a systems administrator, so I see these issues constantly; I know how the subsystems work and I have a deep understanding of the underlying technology, but I haven't done any serious coding work for a long long time. I may be wrong or inaccurate on a few points and I welcome any corrections that anyone may have that they can share.
I've got 2gig fiber, not 56k dialup. It's Steam's bandwidth now. They paid Valve their 30%. Why bother with insane compression that just makes it feel slow for us?
That is also a factor I do not understand. Bandwidth costs the storefront money, would Steam and others not want to decrease this load?
And well done you with that fiber, you dog! I also have a fiber line but see no reason to upgrade from my tariff (150mib, i think?) that covers everything just to shave that hour of download time a year.
Nothing says fun like trying to relax and play a game . Oh no you need an update to the game...Oh did I say game I mean the custom launcher...here is our ads for our other games to click through...oh you must want to go to a webpage...whoops can't connect to online even if you don't want to play online...Ok you finally connected oh but the settings have been reset because of the update...Oh wait the cloud sync didn't work...
And when you finally get the game to run, it needs to compile shaders. Then it need to download another update, from inside the game (and sometimes even restart the game.. Looking at you, MW2! ) And the user agreement have changed so you are forced to scroll to the bottom of one or more LONG legal text before you can click "Accept". And then a season intro cutscene (fortnite and CoD games does that). Then maybe a "Whats new" screen...
I remember Commodore 64 games could take up to 30 minutes to load. But at least I could just go make some food while waiting. Didn't have to sit there and press buttons.
I think in the past the actual devs were more accessible, and their skills visible and admirable. Kind of like how video games themselves were more of a techy nerdy thing.
Today you have humongous teams with the work spread over hundreds of people. We hear from their community managers and marketing teams rather than reading the coders’ opinions. And just like the big games are more of a safe corporate product, they are more mainstream.
I love when gamers hyperfixation only on the bad examples while ignoring the existence of game companies that still do good work. Why elevate the ones doing things right when we can give all our attention to the ones doing things wrong?
I mean this is comparing modern AAA game devs with what would have been considered AAA at the time. I think it's a fair comparison in that regard, but by manpower, 90's ID might be more similar to today's New Blood.
Most devs either don't or can't bother with proper optimization. It's a problem as old as Unreal Engine 3, at least, I remember Unreal Tournament 3 running butter smooth on relatively weak computers, while other games made with UE3 would be choppy and laggy on the same rigs, despite having less graphical clutter.
I could write a whole essay on whats wrong with UE from a players perspective. But here's the skinny.
Light Bloom, Distance Haze, TAA and Upscaling, no visual clarity, Roboto Font for 90% of all UIs, lower framerate for distant objects, no performance diffrence between highest and lowest graphical settings.
The only good looking and optimized UE games come from Epic themselves, so basically just Fortnite (RIP Paragon). Most of the games released by third parties are Primo Garbagio. They run like ass and look like ass.
But UE is the common denominator for all those problems. I actually don't know any positive examples for UE. Satisfactory, maybe, but it still checks most of the issues. They are just less prevalent because the game itself is good.
There's nothing wrong with it. It just doesn't fit everywhere. There's a thematic difference between Action platformers, Horror and Milsims, yet they all use the same font and UI. Imagine if most games would use Naughty Dogs "Yellow ledges". It would get old very quickly.
I mean, if the world makes it very convenient to use such instruments and call the task finished, this is not okay. I wish at some point we would come to conclusion that we need to optimize the code and software products to reduce CO2 emissions or something, so devs' laziness finally becomes less tolerated.
Do you have any recent examples? Am genuinely curious, given that it's something that's been a problem in the game's industry for a long time, particularly at places like Activision.
Totally, that's what I'm trying to lampoon, sorry if the sarcasm didn't come through on that aspect. I maintain my premise, there's a tremendous amount of harassment devs put up with for the 'privilege' of working in the games industry, a key aspect that makes me support unions and worker organization.
They were shitty for different reasons. Notice that nowhere on this meme is "shovelware."
E.T. is always cited as the cause of the video game crash of '82, but it was really the rampart shovelware, no QA to speak of, and a lack of reviews to inform customers what was worth their money and what was absolute garbage. One bad game isn't enough to topple an entire industry; especially one that is only slightly worse than the best game ever made for the Atari.
This problem was, however, mitigated a lot by Nintendo through the late 80's and the entirety of the 90's by creating the kind of licensing agreements between publishers and the console makers that still exist today, as well as the increase in review publications. Most of the best shit (from consumer friendly practices to the games themselves) from the industry came specifically in the 90's thanks in part to actual curation of the software allowed to be sold for these systems.
At least you can easily determine shovelware from something worth your time when everything has reviews attached to the store page. Still sucks that you have to wade through all that bullshit, though.
DRM is nothing new, we just used to have to keep up with the disk or a Key. If always online was an option back then you can bet your ass game publishers would have implemented it.
It was an option back then. They just know nobody would have accepted it then because
Not as many people had the internet, and
The internet that they did have sucked ass
There were still plenty of online-only games. They just had a damn good reason to be online. Always-online in single player isn't needed as DRM. There are plenty of other DRM options that don't use the internet at all or at least only check once in a while when you do have a connection to the Internet.
Jesus...ok obviously it was technically an option, but it would be suicidal in a time when not everyone had Internet in their homes and those that did had unreliable Internet. Don't be obtuse. Those limitations are largely not an issue in 2024.
I was playing video games on my homebuilt computer in the 90s. I know exactly what it was like.
Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.
Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.
Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.
Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.
There's some nostalgia goggles for sure.
I mean, the demo for Rollercoaster Tycoon (Mr. "Hand coded in assembly" there) bricked our Windows 98 machine when i installed it as a kid. My dad was pissed: we had to reformat the harddrive, reinstall windows, all that.
Seems like a golden era of running everything in ring 0, although that wasn't called like this then, afaik
I remember having three or four games that you had to boot the computer into directly. As in, insert floppy and ctrl-alt-delete to launch the game.
Yeah I remember the specific clock speed thing! I had a game that I loved on a friend's computer and didn't get to play it much. Some sort of space sim / combat game. Years later I had my own much more powerful machine and was hyped to check it out. Installed via dosbox or whatever, loaded it up, and it ran at fucking 10x speed! It took seconds to walk around a city and the combat was completely unplayable. So sad but also pretty funny. No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware. If you want an easier game, just get a worse computer apparently.
It's the most trivial and straight forward thing to do. The game is a simple loop of:
The speed of the game is now 100% dependant on the speed of computation. NOT attaching fps to hardware is the hard thing, as you need to detach the game state loop and the drawing loop and then synchronize them. Doing that yourself is extremely complicated. Today developers don't even need to think about that because the whole drawing loop is abstracted away by things like directX/Vulcan and the game engine. But without those tools, fps tied to CPU speed is basically the default.
And in fairness a lot of microcomputers at the time were closed specs. Even on PC for a while you were theoretically aiming at a 4Mhz XT or, at worst, also wanted to account for a 8MHz AT. By the time IBM clones had become... you know, just PCs, a lot of devs either didn't get the memo or chose to ignore it for the reasons you list.
Most of the time "lazy devs" are just "overworked and underfunded devs", but the point is, that didn't start this century.
Also games have gotten way more complicated since the gameboy colour era. I've coded a basic 2D physics engine from scratch (literally just circles with soft collisions) and its not just enough to set up the vector math correctly. You can literally make a true to real life physics model (as far as the math of infinitely rigid perfect spheres on a perfectly flat plane goes anyway) and have all sorts of problems crop up because computers aren't the universe and order of computation is a bitch.
Even the first Dark Souls had game ticks tied to the FPS because consoles had been standardized to 30 FPS for decades.
On the PC port, it was locked to 30 FPS, but a super popular mod unlocked the FPS, and at 60 FPS DoT effects ticked twice as fast, and at even higher FPS could kill you before you had time to react.
GTA San Andreas has an option to uncap the framerate on PC, which outright breaks certain mechanics.
SoundBlaster.
So glad things like that are the past.
Hah. In fairness, sound cards weren't "minimum requirements". It's just that depending on the hardware you had the game would just have a completely different soundtrack, 75% of which sounded completely broken. If you were lucky the "minimum spec" was silence. If you were unlucky it was making your beeper sound like somebody had tripped a car alarm.
People these days are out there emulating Roland MT-32s on Raspberry Pis. I didn't have a sound card until the Pentium era. Every DOS game in my memory sounds like a Furby got a bad case of hiccups.
I leave this as an example, but please understand this is the absolute best case scenario. Michael Land and the rest of the Lucas guys were wizards and actually cared to tune things for multiple options, including really impressive beeper music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr-84mjV3CI
I had a TI-99/4A (It's part of the reason I'm a Texas Drunk) with the speech synthesizer peripheral. Everything sounded wild.
I have heard the difference of sound cards before in a video explaining it, but it is still just a wild too me to hear it, and nearly a bit difficult to imagine it actually being that way. Like I KNOW it was how sound on computers was at that time, but it is still hard to imagine my games sounding so completely differently depending on what pc I play it on.
I have the opposite problem, where I have to remind myself that a lot of people making these memes just don't have a frame of reference for any of this. I'm used to having been there for the vast majority of home computing, it's so hard for me to parse having been born with computers just mostly working the way they do now.
Oh, and while I'm at it, it also looked completely different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo2_ksqxbiQ
Changing GPUs these days mostly just changes your framerate. That wasn't always the case.
I can somewhat comprehens the difference in appearance and sometimes game play, but at the same time not really. I have seen the same game be different on pc vs console and a third version on handheld, and while I know this where all computers, I still very much think of them in the way of game consoles you could also do computer things on, even though I know that they were computers that you could play games on.
I blame it a bit on terminology, every time I hear about old computers, they are always referred to much more similar to how we refer to games consoles today then we do with computers. It is an Amiga 500, Amiga 1000 or an Atari 7800 or Atari ST. That is much more similar in my head to like Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 4.
I have never really heard computers be referred to in that manner now a days, they probably are to some extent in some circles, but I have completely managed to miss them, and I do have some interested in computers. Like I can tell you I have owned a Dell, a HP and a Lenovo amongst some, but I would really have to do some digging to maybe be able to tell what version of them it was.
I know my current one start with G and the following looks some what like lam, but I only know that because it kinda looked like Glam so I named it that and because I have needed to Google that exact model, to look up some stuff.
I can however understand how you feel having grown up with with the computers and now talking to and interacting with a lot of people that never experience the older ones. Realising that people have a completely different fram of reference to something is a very weird thing to experience and somewhat difficult to navigate.
I am however happy that you and other people do have different experiences as then I could learn about how sound cards made games sound completely different or how changing GPU or computers manufacturer could completely change the game.
set blaster=a220 i7 d1 h5 t6
Man I loved the hell out of my SB16. I still play a lot of old DOS games in emulation and work pretty hard to get them to sound like I remember vs the higher fidelity versions.
The last time I had that bug was with Oblivion.
It was the first time I played it and found the combat frustratingly difficult because of the increased speed. Especially in dungeons where I had to bait enemies one by one just to not get overwhelmed. One hand was always holding a healing spell as well.
Sounds like Commander Keen?
Edit: I meant Wing Commander
That's it! Wing Commander!
Damn there's a throwback. Annnnd I feel old now hah.
At my buddy's house, he had a game called something like 'wings of glory' that was meant for an older clock speed. We were messing with the turbo button and it quickly became unplayable when not in the slower mode.
If you try it again, emulators like dosbox let you slow the game down to be playable. I don’t remember the exact setting but I’ve had to do it on things like Freddy Farkas iirc.
Ecco the dolphin was made specifically hard to ensure people couldn't beat it on rental during a weekend.
Right. That was common, too. Games were tiny and very expensive, so broken balance was often used to pad out length. And yeah, it got crazy once Americans started popularizing rental and publishers got desperate to make the games less economical to beat without purchasing them.
I did finish Ecco 1 legit, though. Once.
I've tried the last couple of stages a few times. I still don't understand how tween me managed that. Even on a CRT with original hardware and zero lag that's a stupid thing to try to do.
Pink Floyds welcome to the machine still gives me flashbacks to the last stage of Ecco 1.
Bigger was better, since a larger game meant they packed in more content. Now the bloat is out of control since all game content is delivered over the Internet.
Bloat is out of control because games are HUGE and you can often trade size for performance if you have enough memory to do so.
Also, memory used to be extremely expensive, especially catridge ROMs. Outside of the Switch this is less of a concern now, that's true, but the tradeoff is you get to have pin-sharp high resolution assets and tons of performance optimizations instead of... you know, just chopping enough frames of animation to fit your sprites in 16 megabits then charge a hundred bucks for the extra-sized cart. You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now for the money it used to cost to buy a single game shipped on a cartridge.
When I got my brand new 486 PC, I paid over $800 for a 4 MB SIMM card. That is 4 MEGS, not GIGS, 4 MB. That brought up my memory up to 8 MBs.
I was also king of the hill when I added a second hard drive for a total of 40 MBs!
The hard drive I had to wipe from the OS, as I mentioned above was a whole 20 gig. 386-ish era. It seemed so huge when I got it (and so expensive) and by the time that PC was done it was... well, a "wipe to OS to fit stuff in" drive.
But that's not necessarily the point, the more relevant thing is how big things are relative to storage and how cheap it is to upgrade storage. It's true that storage sizes and prices plateaued for a while, so a bunch of people are still running on 1-2 TB while the games got into the hundreds of GB. But still, storage had gotten so proportionately cheap before then, and very fast storage is so overkill now. A 1TB Gen 3 NVMe is 75 bucks, and most games will run fine on it, Sony propaganda notwithstanding.
20 GB during the 386 era does not check out for home PCs.
20 MB is more realistic for that era.
20 megs maybe.
Hah. Yeah, I meant 20 megs. My muscle memory just doesn't want to type a number that low, it seems.
You can fit loads of x360-ps3 era games in the same space CoD warzone takes. The irony is that, for PC players with lower specs, that's a lot of wasted storage, since they'll never use/load the higher res textures.
That line of thinking is what leads to extreme, unnecessary bloat. "Just buy more storage, brah"
You can absolutely do that. You can also fit 16 frames of the Xbox 360 game into a single frame of the Xbox Series X game.
Sometimes people forget how much bigger a 4K target is compared to a 720p image, so I added a bit of a visual aid below. Those two screenshots are to scale, displayed at the native resolutions of their respective platforms. Just keep in mind that the big one is from a 1440p 21:9 monitor, so on a 4K TV the picture would have two of those stacked on top of each other.
It's good that this is smaller, because If you squint you can also notice the Xbox 360 game is extremely blurry and looks like it's in black and white. That's because it is. The 360 had 512megs of ram, to share between the CPU and the GPU. The Xbox Series X has 16 gigs, so 32 times more, and it's running a cool 300 times faster. 360 games were compressing textures within an inch of their lives to fit them into that tiny slab of memory, stripping color data among other things.
Computers are not magic. If you want to draw 15 million pixels of a wall and not have it look like soup you need data for each of those pixels. If you want that data to fit in less space you have to either spend resources compressing and decompressing it or you need more storage to put it in. Or you can draw it procedurally, I guess, but then you're back to the performance problem.
On the other thing, it's not "just buy more storage, brah", it's that storage has to ramp linearly with memory. If you are trying to build huge worlds running at hundreds of frames and streaming data at gigabytes per second out of a SSD you're going to need to put those assets somewhere. The problem isn't (just) that games are big, it's that the ability to move those big assets has grown a bit faster than the ability to make cheaper, faster storage for the same price.
Games aren't big because developers are lazy, they're big because physics and engineering are hard and not every piece of technology improves at the same rate. But hey, on the plus side, storage HAS gotten cheaper. By the end of its life the PS3 was shipping 500 GB. The PS5 and Xbox Series ship 32 times more ram but only 1.5 to 2x more storage because storage is where everybody is skimping to contain costs. That's not commensurate with the increase of visual fidelity or asset size, but at least you can add more for relatively little money, especially on PC.
EDIT: Sorry, this client didn't like the picture going in. Link to an example below from a random image hosting site. Follow it at your peril, I make no claims about its safety.
https://ibb.co/Ss7RfzW
I remember reading an early-2000s book on game dev. It did mention that some game (I want to say one of the Unreal games, but I can't recall for sure) had to code their level loading in assembler because it was taking upwards of 10 minutes in C++.
Yeah, I definitely think the OP has super rose-colored glasses on. The free shareware was pretty awesome, though. I had one called "80 mega-hits" or something like that with a ton of games (many of which my poor old PC couldn't run).
I do think that optimization has slacked off more as hardware prices generally trended down. Disk space I don't so much mind, but memory and CPU are still expensive.
The "free shareware" thing is kind of back. I've been noticing more and more games producing demos; check out Steam Next fest, for example.
I also remember playing a ton of games from a CD. I had a Mac at the time, but it was "dos compatible", which meant it had a 486 in addition to the Mac processor at the time, so you could switch over into dos, though you could only allocate half the ram to it.
We ended up installing Windows 95 to play a lot of the games, which ran great on the available 4 MB of RAM.
This is one of those things where I'm not sure what people mean when they say it.
There are bugs that affect performance, and yeah, we're generally more likely to see bugs fro several reasons now. But there's also games just being heavy. We're not in a cycle where the top of the line hardware just maxes out many games, because... well, we're doing real time path-tracing, we have monitors that go up to 400 Hz and resolutions up to 4K. The times of "set it to Ultra and forget about it" with a 1080 are gone and not coming back for a really long time. Plus everything has to scale wider now, because on the other end we have actual handhelds now, which is nuts.
So yeah, I'm not sure which one people are complaining about these days. I'll say that if you can play a game in a handheld PC and then crank it up to look like an offline rendered path traced movie that's way more thought to scalability than older games ever had, but maybe that's a slightly different conversation.
I used to have a meta-game where I tried to fit X-wing and Windows 3.1 on the same 40MB hard drive. Just barely made it.
Same, in my case as a European. PAL is weird.
Oh, that's a whole other subject. "Old games were so polished and fully finished". Meanwhile, half of the planet was either playing games squished down, in slow motion or both. And most of them didn't even know.
It's not as simple as that, either. May people think all games ran 15% slower. Many games did have some retiming somewhere, but it was definitely not great and people didn't complain because with no internet, they often didn't realize what was going on.
I remember that for MegaMan we needed to turn off the turbo (yes the CPU button) or it ran really fast.
Maybe the opposite, the turbo button actually slowed down the CPU so you could play games that had a speed limit.
I remember doing this Battle of Britain and TIE Fighter! Man, memories.
It was actually 700 MB
Oh, no. It was not.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you'd mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you'd need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.
I think I came along around 2 years after burners were commercially available, so I never saw that. And the 700 MB discs came along very shortly later. So I never had a concept of a 550 MB CD (btw you said 500 MB). This is the first I've heard of it.
It did exist, I promise. But again, I just default to 500 because it was such common shorthand to think about it in terms of needing two discs to store a gig. And to this day I still have 650 CDs laying around, even when 700MB ones were available they were both around at once.
I think some of the mismatch may also be that you're thinking about it in terms of storage only (i.e. CD-Rs) because of your age and I'm probably a bit older and was mostly talking about them as read-only media. It was years between the first CDs in the late 80s and writers being widespread at all, assuming whatever game or application that came in a single CD was going to take 500 meg-ish to duplicate or install was, again, pretty useful.
In any case, this is obsolete trivia. The point is we went from games being tens of megs to hundreds of megs overnight, and we were all extremely pleased about it.
You really seem to be misremembering again, since the original CD spec could hold 650 MiB of data.
You are half right. I am misremembering 63min being the original standard of the red book audio CD, that was 650 already, although apparently 63 min CDs were used for audio mastering at some point? Info about that is sparse. As a side note, man, modern search engines suuuck.
Anyway, 63min/550MB was the low capacity standard of the CD-R instead.
People are aware of them, but man, it took me a while to find a contemporary technical reference to it being available. I ended up having to pull it from the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070110232445/http://www.mscience.com/faq55.html
And also this, from a eBay auction selling a box and labelling them "incredibly rare", which apparently is accurate. I came just shy of digging through my pile of old CDs to see if I have any left. I may still do that next time I have them on hand.
Well now you're changing the conversation to CD-R, not just CD.
"Then" is just indie today.
That and it easily running on Linux, either naively or though Proton, is why I haven't touched any AAA in like... at least 5 years? Maybe closer to 10.
A lot of today's indie devs are also... well...
groomerwojak.jpg: "I groomed a teen fan of mine, and when she came forward I made her to write an apology, also I spent my Patreon money on a sexdoll, and my code is spaghetti."
"We barely managed to make a functioning game with premade assets, and our popularity was so dependent on Pokémon not performing well, our fanbase is a toxic cesspool as a result, who can't express the love to the game without actively dissing Nintendo."
"I'm a bigoted con artist who rebrands every time they get busted for his crappy horror game."
"Optimization? We are already using low-poly assets!"
"The assets in our pixelart games are very unaligned, and we use high-resolution fonts because no one makes bitmap fonts anymore."
Nothing wrong with spending Patreon money on a sexdoll.
It is when you're supposed to work on your game.
He was working on his game. The sex doll only turns him down half the time now.
If you donate money to develop a vaccine against something, much of that money will go towards the salaries of researchers to pay for their work. Some of them may buy sex dolls, dildos, satisfyers or chastity belts with some of that money, because they have rightfully earned it, and the money you paid was still used to develop that vaccine.
I mean nobody said all indie devs were great, i just think that if you want to find examples of good game development today you're largely going to find the stars are indie, not triple A
Why are you twisting things around? It's Nintendo fans that won't shut up about plagiarism to the point that the The Pokémon Company told everyone that they know, stop sending emails about it.
Por que no los dos?
I didn't even mention the plagiarism stuff here, which was likely due to the creators learning monster design only from Pokémon.
The meme does specify AAA
But only for today. The concept of triple A didn't really exist back then, and at least one of the "then" game devs was totally indie for the game he made
Games back then : created by 1 to 4 people with autism because they wanted to have fun on a computer
Games now : driven by dickheads that just left business school at the whims of billionaire conglomoration funds.
I miss when games used to be good. Anyone 'member Vampire Survivors, Lethal Company, Bug Fables? Developers these days just can't compare.
now that's survivor bias
EDIT : here's the fun thing, Lethal company would have been a mod back in the day
Tbf, games were easier to create using in-game functions and logic that was created for another game. Modding a whole rework was easier than making the entire game from scratch. Undeniably lethal company is similar in look and feel but it has better game play than some mods.
Exactly, creating a mod for half-life or similar titles was simply the easiest way to get a decent working 3d fps engine without coding it yourself.
the tools these days make it basically the same to work a mod or an inde game.
Is your point that developers today aren't as good/benevolent/whatever as devs back in the day? I'm saying (sarcastically, I suppose) that the same type of developers exist today. What does survivor's bias have to do with it? Is my point moot because GMOD exists?
Your point is moot because there is an unending hose of indie games being created and knowing that 2 gems exist doesn't mean the rest of the cottage industry measures up to the things being achieved earlier, and nor does said indie scene have a similar rate of success as the old industry back then.
What are you, a shareholder? Why does the 'rate of success' matter? I didn't list three games because there were only two gems.
It's like being at the library and saying "fantasy authors will never compete with what JK Rowling was writing, just look at how many books are here!"
it's survivor bias because having one or two good games in a tidal wave of indie bug riddled, knockoff messes isn't exactly the same thing as the innovations from back in the day. Some asshole's Amnesia knockoff or twin stick shooter being good is hardly surprinsing when 5000 of them come out daily.
To be fair, game devs did the hackiest shit to deal with the constraints of the time. They did things that no programmer would do today because they're bad practices when you're not worried about tiny amounts of RAM or storage.
I love watching videos about old game systems programming. The gymnastics you had to do to code, like, super Mario, just to show more than 3 colors is really interesting.
People who think modern coding practices are bloated should study why certain speed running mechanics work. A lot of them stem from things we would never do today. We've removed entire classes of bugs by using "bloated" languages and tools.
But we introduce entirely new classes at the same time.
A Cuphead dev reacting to Cuphead speedruns is an interesting watch because he explains why all the tricks work.
Not really. We have more bugs because there are more lines of code.
And fewer lines of coke.
I vaguely remember this. What is it from again?
You will probably enjoy this video: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=nYDmBdUalgo
Dude livestreamed Super Mario 64 for more than a month with a bot attached that perfectly abused a physics quirk based on floating point precision, just so he can crash the game at 0:00 at New Year's by overflowing a value. This over-one-hour-long video is the summary.
If you haven't seen them, look up the Ultimate talk on YouTube. They go into real depth on c64, Gameboy, Atari, Amiga, etc. development and all the tricks that are used.
The games then were closer to embedded dev than software dev. The cartridge had huge limitations and the devs had to know those limits and work around them.
Cartridges were also full on daughter boards instead of just an older version of SD cards. There were massive differences between games. The later SNES games with 3d graphics had a whole extra processor included in the cart.
The old Super FX chip. I'm old enough to remember when they released the original Star Fox and flogged the super onboard 3d processing. The ads in comic books mentioned it by name.
Stunt Race FX really stood out to me, even now I remember being impressed by the visuals.
2d games did, too. The SA1 chip did a lot to make games run better on the SNES. There's mods out there for running games on the SA1 chip, especially shooters like Super R-Type, and it's a substantially better experience.
I think it was David Braben that used the video buffer as extra ram. Coded text on screen in the same colour blue as the sky and stored it there.
Sometimes they did it just in case they needed those limited resources, but its not really needed. SMW is a good example, where spite interactions are only checked every other frame, but modders generally remove that limitation without any issues. There might be weird edge cases where in vanilla without glitches you could theoretically accumulate enough sprite on stream it causes a slightly more noticeable slowdown without the ever other frame. With cape float, it only checks if you are holding the jump button once every 4 frames or something like that. Totally unnecessary and makes the game feel less responsive. Granted, during a casual playthrough, you'd probably never notice that floating stopping after letting go of the button varies by 50ms depending on which frame you let go of the button relative to which frame it checks.
And even then the code was far from the best it could be.
This guy optimized Super Mario 64 and drastically improved performance while fixing several bugs.
Problems with game developers might better be understood as problems with capitalism, to paraphrase Ted Chiang
We can’t update games or refactor code to make it smaller bc our bosses demand we constantly work harder, better, faster, stronger. They force us into games that require more expensive hardware bc the entire tech industry depends on people upgrading every other year. And it’s online constantly bc we hoover up player data for our new profit centre where we sell all your data.
And now they made a meme that deflects blame off them and onto devs, who have way more contact w the public than anonymous rich people
CaPiTaLiSm HNNNNNGGGG!
Capitalism was a thing back before games got shitty too.
Enshittification is just another name for the type of capitalism America practices.
Everything gets worse because it's not profitable to stay good when there are only 147 umbrella corps worldwide. Capitalism doesn't reward innovation in products when monopolies exist, it rewards innovations in minutiae of existing products.
See also: DLC, Premium Passes, Microtransactions, Seasonal Content, Free-to-Play*, Ads in AAA tier games and everywhere else, Subscriptions, and every other shitty innovation the market (no not consumers, shareholders) rewards.
That's to say nothing of how these companies extract the value of their employees labor and then lay them off to keep turnover at whatver level the coke addicts in the c-suite have determined is best. Crunchtime, harrassment, fuck man look at Bobby fucking Kotnick and his blizzard shitshow.
Tetris: hold my beer
*Socialism intensifies*
Qhile that is true the effects of it were lesser since it was more niche. Plus some of the best games are still in their own weird niche, ive been playing STALKER GAMMA which is a free modpack for a free mod, and help I am being consumed! I DREAM OF REPAIR KITS AND GUN ANIMATION, HNNNNNNGH KILL MONOLITH!
So we're just gonna conveniently forget all the shovelware from that time period?
Yes. Because older is always better. Then when the present is the before times people will look back fondly on it too.
Wait...just how much worse are they going to get‽
That's just being intellectually dishonest in the opposite direction.
The truth is some things do get worse, some things get better, and in either case, the right thing to do is examine the tangible effects, positive or negative.
Yeah, heavy survivorship bias in this one.
Everyone seems to think that games like Doom and Half-Life came out all the time. I remember looking at shareware disks in shops and seeing loads of games that looked like total crap.
For sure! just go to Abandonware and try to go to a specific year to find something. You have to wade through pages of garbo to find something worth playing.
One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was digging through the "1000s of Games" disc I had that was full of demos, shovelware, Doom mods, and tons of other garbage. Occasionally you'd find a diamond hidden in the turds.
There's even a Youtuber who does "Shovelware Diggers" as a show and it's just that! Him and his community riffle around in old shareware collections looking for treasures, which he showcases. (Edit to add: Looked it up and he ended the show after 300 episodes! He still does other retro gaming stuff too. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCIZNtotF3Xh0dfQjJx8XcP_73UGtjqN0&si=Gvx5W0mmjTE48z79 )
But yeah, most of the content on those discs would have qualified more as viruses than games, if they even ran in the first place!
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 1999, so I'll choose to believe that the "then" era was after the big gaming crash of the 80s. There was still shovelware, but it wasn't nearly as bad as during the 80s when you'd see mountains and mountains of terrible, non-functioning games. I don't think anyone really has nostalgia for that period of gaming, but the late 90s to early 2000s really were as close to a golden age as we ever got.
Gaming crash was more of a console thing. One of the arguments was why you should buy a console when you can buy a computer for a bit more and do so much more. Computer games ran through it mostly unfazed.
Or all the shitty licensed games. I'm sure there's a number of older gamers triggered by the LJN logo.
I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.
I played some pretty good games on the 48k spectrum back in the day. My first computer was a zx81 with 1k ram, it was a bit challenging to do anything interesting with it - but people still wrote games for the thing.
While true that it's impressive, now games have to be made to work on variable screen sizes with different input controllers, key mappings, configurations, more operating systems, with more features than ever. It's an absolute explosion of complexity.
Even making a 2D game for today's hardware is more difficult than making a 2D game for Gameboy.
Honest question, is that true? It's my understanding that developing a 2D game today would be a simpler task than for a system from the 90s due to so many improvements in development software.
You realize it's not devs that make those decisions, right? It's publishers and execs. You know, the guys who make the actual money in all this. Stop blaming devs for stupid exec decisions.
So glad to see op being called out in the comments
Well, you're right. However if no dev stands for that it couldn't get made.
Of course I also understand that devs want to eat, too. But the truth is somewhere in between.
Meh, it depends on which of the issues you're flagging. Games are large for understandable reasons, both technical and practical. The optimization problem is... complicated, and my thoughts on it get really into the weeds, but it's not as simple as people would think. And I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the "can't fix our game" panel, because at best it makes no sense.
The always-online thing is maybe the most controversial, and you'd definitely find the most developers who agree with you on that unconditionally. But also, tons of offline games get made on all types of scopes.
Yeav plus games today are way more complicated so there is a LOT more to optimize, and the execs are rushing those games out
Exec: breast milk for everyone!
Also, devs stick around for it. They aren't providing an essential service, like sticking around as a nurse in a poorly run hospital...they are creating a novelty.
And where should they go? How else do they make money?
Huh? We live in a society! Do anything you want!
They are technical knowledge workers and hold very privileged credentials in western markets.
To be clear I'm not excusing corporate policy and such, but the same way technical engineers at oil companies are complicit in accelerated climate change, devs at shitty companies are complicit in shitty game products.
Getting downvoted by salty tech folks working for nestle and shell I guess.
Yup. Or coddled game devs who think they are gods gift to society.
Game dev is real work, but it's entirely optional.
I never worked for big bad companies but even the "green, progressive" ones wore me down eventually, there just aren't any companies in the modern world over a certain size that aren't scummy one way or another. That's why I only work for myself now.
I almost worked in NGO but it didn't work out in the end, I could still be curious to check that out at some point.
Guess the Devs are just following orders, huh?
Yeah, totally, they're no better than Nazis, top fucking comparison, buddy.
It’s an extreme example but the principle remains the same: The idea of someone’s responsibility when following questionable orders.
No, it's a fucking stupid comparison, man. One thing leads to dead people, the other thing leads to slightly less convenient entertainment software. Can you figure out the rest for yourself? Fuck all the way off with your "questionable orders".
What’s with the hostility? Did your Wife cheat on you again?
I expressed how your comparison is stupid. I'm sorry if you perceive that as hostile and think you need to get a point in by making up an equally stupid scenario about my marriage. Obviously I hit a nerve. Can't say the same about your shitty attempt at an insult.
"WHY ARE YOU PIRATING OUR GAMES???"
BECAUSE IF BUYING ISNT OWNING THE PIRATING ISNT STEALING.
It seems like a clever qoute when you first hear it, but stealing a rental or a lease is still stealing.
"Because it's easy... And it does a lot of damage."
Great happy souls refrence.
Disgruntled kitty isn't gruntled.
Very rose tinted glasses. I remember horrifying cache corruption bugs that locked you out of certain game areas permanently on that save, random illegal operation exceptions crashing games (no autosave btw), the whole system regularly freezing and needing to be completely restarted, games just inexplicably not working to begin with on a regular basis because of some hardware incompatibility and the internet sucked for finding fixes then and patches weren't a thing so you were just screwed.
I would say that games not all being written in C and assembly trying to squeeze out every possible performance efficiency with nothing but dev machismo as safeguards is in fact a good thing.
Here's revelation: most game engines are written in C(++)
Yes, but they are made by different people and all those bugs have been worked out over time. The people actually making the games are doing so at a higher level with more safeguards and it shows.
Not just games . I download one of the trendy note pad apps. It’s 500mb.
I've been using zoho notes on my phone for a long time now. It started out really good, but somehow has become so bloated that it's laggy. It's PLAIN TEXT. How do you make that lag??
Thanks for supporting shitcoin mining, I'm so close to recouping my goal of 10% of the thousands of dollars I've lost.
Which one? Obsidian for desktop is 400MB, but it lets you make knowledge trees and includes a zotero extension. Although maybe it doesn’t need to be 400MB.
Obsidian was big - I think close to 500 on the mac ? But Logseq was another
For those that are unaware, the second chad is most likely referring to .kkrieger. Not a full game, but a demo (from a demoscene) whose purpose was to make a fully playable game with a max size of 96kb. Even going very slow, you won't need more than 5 minutes to finish it.
The startup is very CPU heavy and takes a while, even on modern systems, because it generates all the geometry, textures, lighting and whatnot from stored procedures.
I remember beating that and just being really surprised at how well it worked
What a horrible take. Game devs were so bad at one point in the past they almost killed the entire market. Classic survivorship bias here.
That's because the business assholes flooded the market with shitty games that cost $120 (adjusted for inflation) that looked like this :
https://i.imgur.com/yQAWeYw.jpeg
Not the game dev's fault, it's the business asshole's fault, just like the image.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q
Pretty sure it's on the devs for making the buggy games though. IIRC, ET is unbeatable without cheating or playing a patched version. It's far from the only one with problems.
I have news for you, all software is riddled with bugs and no dev has infinite time.
The reason some software works better than others is that people paid for it to be developed for long enough.
"Hi, you have 5 weeks to make a game based on this IP because we HAVE to ship for christmas." - No way in hell anything remotely decent would've come out from 35 days of work.
Not the entire market, only the American one. Everywhere else was doing fine.
which event are you refering to?
There was a period of time when a massive influx of shovelware was released. Think stuff like the ET game. No one wanted to buy it, and the industry almost became a bust. Nintendo came in and almost single handedly revived the entire industry by releasing novel, high quality games like donkey kong. This is why Nintendo is a modern household name and why you mostly see atari in museums.
Also the Atari name/trademark/copyright got sold, and mergered about a dozen times. The current owners bear basically no relation to the original game company.
I think he's talking about that time when Atari buried a bunch of their games in a desert in Mexico because no one was buying them
New Mexico, the American state. Not Mexico the country.
Myb
Fuck the haters. 80s game devs were creating beauty out of nothing.
I wasn't exactly old enough to have experienced this, but I know there was a time that if you wanted to play a PC game, you didn't buy it on a floppy or a disc; you got a book with code that you had to type up and compile yourself. If you did more than just follow the book, you could understand it and change it to be whatever you wanted!
This is why I wish everything was open source. If I don't like the way something is done, I can tweak it. Any part of it and make it perfect for me.
That was more the zx spectrum / commodore era and even then you could still buy most things on tape. Magazines used to print code though.
At least until the cover tape wars started. Then it got crazy.
But yeah, I remember taking shifts with my pal typing lines in. One mistake and you got to learn the joys of debugging at age 7.
The closest I got was learning that the TI-85 I used in my algebra classes had BASIC programming in it, and I found the code for a rogulike dungeon crawler kinda like Eye of the Beholder specifically for the calculator. At the time, I already knew plenty of BASIC myself so I could tweak things as I found bugs or generally didn't like the stats of an item.
I'm a software dev now, and I always like to say that ti basic was my first programming language.
Remember drug wars?
You can go to GOG, buy some really old game, install it on a PC, play it and after a few minutes go: "How the fk was I so dazzled with this shit back then?!"
At least for me, whilst most such game were A LOT of fun back then, almost all of them feel kinda meh nowadays, the graphics-heavy ones because they look like shit now compared to even games from 10 year ago and the other ones because their game mechanics are so shallow and simplistic (and often oh so reliant on reaction times) compared to even what Indie companies have been doing in the last couple of decades.
Yeah, the memory of the fun that was had survived the passage of time, but most of those games pale in comparisson to games I've played in the last 2 decades. Beware of confusing the two like the sterotypical old person who complains "Music was much better when I was young, before Rock-n-Roll".
PS: I'm not even especially big on fancy graphics but instead prefer complex multi-layered game mechanics, so the kind of games from back then I still can enjoy today are things like Civilization.
Lack of games to compare to, mostly. For instance, how many games could you compare Warcraft to, back in 1994? Probably only Dune II. By 1999, any RTS game would be compared to Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation and possibly others. "Doom clone" remained the definition of FPS for roughly 3 years. Meanwhile, every platformer since the late 80s was compared to half the catalogue available on the NES. Something something "learning from others' mistakes, standing on the shoulders of giants"
Not every old game is a gem, just like not every modern game is trash. One of my personal old favorites that holds up well is Jedi Outcast. Does a better job at making you feel like a lightsaber wielding jedi than Force Unleashed
Also, Suspension Of Disbelief worked extra hard back then and nowadays it's a bit more lazy... ;)
I'm not talking about comparison to modern expectation; I'm saying that devs were scrappier, had less established frameworks of design and technology, and still created a beautiful cultural moment
Yeah, I mostly agree with that.
Mind you, the biggest hindrance the create something special back then was technical, nowadays it's time: codebases are far more massive nowadays and the work that goes into making assets (sprites, models, audio, animation and so on) that go with the code in a modern game is gigantic compared to back then (or, alternativelly, if done with reusable assets you get just another of hundred of similar-loooking low-buget indie games).
Even something like Bioshock with it's unique vision was already a massive piece of work when it comes to game assets, though artistically (and as a game too) it's a masterpiece, IMHO.
I actually made a handfull of games back in the early 90s (a minesweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum done in Assembly and never published, and a Tic-Tac-Toe game for the PC done in C that I sold to a small magazine and did got published) and then started working on game making a few years ago, and definitelly the programing work has expanded in terms of size (with still some down-to-the-metal technically complex stuff like shader programming) but the asset creation work has massivelly exploded (no wonder AAA games have bugets in the hundreds of millions of dollars range).
Lemmings was not the product of a huge corporation.
I see stuff like this and I don't blame developers/coders for all the shit that's happening. If you objectively look at gameplay and such, most games are actually pretty decent on their own. The graphics are usually really nice and the story is adequate, if not quite good, the controls are sensible and responsive...
A lot of the major complaints about modern games isn't necessarily what the devs are making, it's more about what the garbage company demands is done as part of the whole thing. Online only single player is entirely about control, keeping you from pirating the game (or at least trying to) plus supplying on you and serving you ads and such... Bad releases are because stuff gets pushed out the door before it's ready because the company needs more numbers for their profit reports, so things that haven't been given enough time and need more work get pushed onto paying customers. Day one patches are normal because between the time they seed the game to distributors like valve and Microsoft and stuff, and the time the game unlocks for launch day, stuff is still being actively worked on and fixed.
The large game studios have turned the whole thing into a meat grinder to just pump money out of their customers as much as possible and as often as possible, and they've basically ruined a lot of the simple expectations for game releases, like having a game that works and that performs adequately and doesn't crash or need huge extras (like updates) to work on day 1....
Developers themselves aren't the problem. Studios are the problem and they keep consolidating into a horrible mass of consumer hostile policies.
"The inverse square root function in the C math library isn't fast enough. That's okay, I'll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster."
Step 2: what the fuck?
I never thought game patches would become such a terrible thing. But the state some games have released in has been crazy.
...Is the breast milk thing inspired by reality? Wait, I don't know if I really want to know.
https://www.thegamer.com/activision-blizzard-breast-milk-stolen/
Blizzard I think
🤢 Thanks, I guess.
DAE games bad now??
it's not devs fault, is the company
If only the buyers of the games would realize how good it used to be. They control this awful market.
This is so true. Also let's not forget where game is almost unplayable and constantly crashing on release.
I hate this conflation of "Developer" with every other role in modern game development.
If you think the new Porsche looks shit, do you blame the Mecanical engineer who designed the brake mechanism?
If your new manga body pillow gives you a rash, do you blame the graphic designer of the manga?
There is not a single thing listed in the meme above that is actually the fault of the actual developers working on the game. Don't even need to talk about the first picture.
game size is studio management related. They want to stuff as much (repetitive, boring) content into the game as possible. Plus a multiplayer mode no one asked for.
Optimizations don't happen because the CEO decides to take the sales money of the game this quarter, and not next, and ships an unfinished product.
Always online is ALWAYS a management decision.
It's a shit joke, it's wrong because it blames the wrong people, and its also just dumb.
those always online "single-player" games aren't what you think.
your ads and tracking friends are always interested in playing with you.
Play Xonotic. I get 200 fps on Intel HD Graphics 2000.
I absolutely love Xonotic! This is my hype song! https://youtu.be/pLKo5TitJm4?si=wDW8dQCpbaraiNZP
YouTube knows what I like.
What server do you play on and when?
I don't have a computer ATM. I lost everything over fake criminal charges.
Also add Red Eclipse to the queue and get lost in the adrenaline this week.
Besides being a maintenance fucking nightmare, wouldn't writing a game in assembly make it a lot harder to be cross platform? I really don't get that panel.
Yes, yes it would. They meant to say that it would improve performance (if done well, which it was). That improved performance would allow it to run on a wide variety of devices, including those with low specs.
Also at the time writing for x86 only would have been plenty portable. Even today that would cover "standard" PC architecture. (Although nowadays you probably want to put it on mobile devices, gaming consoles or macOS, so not ideal.)
Yeah, it being about performance makes sense. Still don't know how that dude managed to write a full-ass game in assembly though. Takes a special brain to even be able to think that way.
That idea comes from the tycoon games because they run on newer windows versions easily. But it's not because they were made in assembly. Any programming language can do that as long as the program doesn't depend on specific OS features that get changed or removed. I think assembly is just synonymous with everything being from scratch.
I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.
Yeah exactly. Apparently they meant "most machines" as in "most machines that could run windows". Like in a performance sense. Weird way to put it imo, since "most machines" to me would refer to platform concerns.
games made with agile teams and with passions are probably good, regardless of when they were made. i'm young but growing up i only had access to really old computers and saw that most of the stuff that was made back in the day was just garbage shovelware. it was hard not to get buried in them.
most triple A developers today are far more skilled in both writing and optimizing the code however when the management is forcing you to work long hours you're gonna make more mistakes and with tight deadlines, if you're doing testing and bug fixing after developing the entire game then it's going to be the first thing that's getting cut.
that being said i wish they really did something about the massive size games take on disk. my screen is 1080p, my hardware can barely handle your game on low in 1080p so everything is gonna get downscaled regardless and despite how hard you wanna ignore it data caps are still here, why am i forced to get all assets and textures in 4k 8k? make it optional goddamit.
AAA games are turning into luxury/super cars. At the top end, they're just not made for average consumers anymore where you need money for infrastructure to even drive the thing. But then you also have plenty of Indie/AA studios creating games that surpass AAA from 10-15 years ago with much smaller teams cause tools and skills make it feasible. Of course there's also the starcrafts and the counterstrikes that are over 20 years old and will never die, the Toyota Camrys and Honda Civics of games, they just get perpetually refreshed
Ok, that got me. I still remember the days of ZX and that funny noise... But I do have a question for one part of the meme: can someone explain to me why on Earth the updates now weigh these tens of gigs? I can accept that hires textures and other assets can take that space, but these are most likely not the bits that are being updated most of the time. Why don't devs just take the code they actually update and send that our way?
The trick is to download the Fitgirl repack. Cheaper on your wallet and your hard drive.
I am perfectly fine with paying developers, as I buy only the games i do like after some testing ) Going the repack route is unpredictable - no updates, may contain whatever viruses repacker is interested in adding (and given the particular one is likely Russian, I do have my reservations at this crazy time...), etc.
Joking aside, when you download an update, many times it is completely replacing chunks of the game, not just a couple lines of code.
I mean, I understand when they chuck everything into a single file, but they used to know how to make their updaters unpack and replace only the stuff that needed updating, instead of just throwing the whole fucking file at you, redundancy be damned.
For instance, stuff in Quake 3 engine is kept in .pk3 files. You don't need to download the full, newest .pk3, you send a command to remove/replace files X, Y and Z within it and call it a day.
Yeah but then people go completely ballistic when games require you to install their own launches I don't think Steam would necessarily be able to handle the myriad of different formats that would be needed to make that work. So either you have custom lunches or you don't have particularly efficient patches.
I guess most people care more about the launcher.
That's because games don't need "their own launcher" to apply updates like that. Ask anyone that's been playing on PC, patches were these self extracting files or "mini installers" that you just needed to point to the installed game's folder. Even vanilla World of Warcraft let people download the patches for offline install, it even included a text with all the changes applied.
People don't want the fiddling on of that. I just want to be able to install the patch and then it be there.
That's why lunches are a thing there's no other reason to have them.
You might enjoy the technical solution but 99% of people don't care. I never understand why people seem to think that the 1% of the most experienced people are the standard when they are anything but. Most gamers build their own PCs, they don't want to have to understand about file systems and formats and compiling. They just wanted to work and then they want to play their game.
For modern games, from what I've seen, they've taken a more modular approach to how assets are saved. So you'll have large data files which are essentially full of compressed textures or something. Depending on how many textures you're using and how many versions of each textures is available (for different detail levels), it can be a lot of assets, even if all the assets in this file, are all wall textures, as an example.
So the problem becomes that the updaters/installers are not complex enough to update a single texture file in a single compressed texture dataset file. So the solution is to instead, replace the entire dataset with one that contains the new information. So while you're adding an item or changing how something looks, you're basically sending not only the item, but also all similar items (all in the same set) again, even though 90% didn't change. The files can easily reach into the 10s of gigabytes in size due to how many assets are needed. Adding a map? Dataset file for all maps needs to be sent. Adding a weapon or changing the look/feel/animation of a weapon? Here's the entire weapon dataset again.
Though not nearly as horrible, the same can be said for the libraries and executable binaries of the game logic. This variable was added, well, here's that entire binary file with the change (not just the change). Binaries tend to be a lot smaller than the assets so it's less problematic.
The entirety of the game content is likely stored in a handful (maybe a few dozen at most) dataset files, so if any one of them change for any reason, end users now need to download 5-10% of the installed size of the game, to get the update.
Is there a better way? Probably. But it may be too complex to accomplish. Basically write a small patching program to unpack the dataset, replace/insert the new assets, then repack it. It would reduce the download size, but increase the amount of work the end user system needs to do for the update, which may or may not be viable depending on the system you've made the game for. PC games should support it, but what happens if you're coding across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo switch? Do those consoles allow your game the read/write access they need to the storage to do the unpacking and repacking? Do they have the space for that?
It becomes a risk, and doing it the way they are now, if you have enough room to download the update, then no more space is needed, since the update manager will simply copy the updated dataset entirely, over the old one.
It's a game of choices and variables, risks and rewards. Developers definitely don't want to get into the business of custom updates per platform based on capabilities, so you have to find a solution that works for everyone who might be running the game. The current solution wastes bandwidth, but has the merit of being cross compatible, and consistent. The process is the same for every platform.
The console argument does actually make a lot of sense to me, thank you for the detailed response. It would still (seemingly) be possible to structure the project in a way that would allow replacing only what you actually need to replace, but that requires more investment in the architecture and likely cause more errors due to added complexity. Still, i cannot forgive the BG 3 coders for making me redownload these 120gb or so! )
The issue is the compression. There's hundreds of individual assets, the process to compress or more accurately, uncompress the assets for use takes processor resources. Usually it only really needs to be done a few times when the game starts, when it loads the assets required. Basically when you get to a loading screen, the game is unpacking the relevant assets from those dataset files. Every time the game opens one of those datasets, it takes time to create the connection to the dataset file on the host system, then unpack the index of the dataset, and finally go and retrieve the assets needed.
Two things about this process: first, securing access to the file and getting the index is a fairly slow process. Allocating anything takes significant time (relative to the other steps in the process) and accomplishes nothing except preparing to load the relevant assets. It's basically just wasted time. The second thing is that compressed files are most efficient in making the total size smaller when there's more data in the file.
Very basically, the most simple compression, zip (aka "compressed folders" in Windows) basically looks through the files for repeating sections of data, it then replaces all that repeated content with a reference to the original data. The reference is much smaller than the data it replaces. This can also be referred to as de-duplication. In this way if you had a set of files that all contained mostly the same data, say text files with most of the same repeating messages, the resulting compression would be very high (smaller size) and this method is used for things like log files since there are many repeating dates, times, and messages with a few unique variances from line to line. This is an extremely basic concept of one style of compression that's very common, and certainly not the only way, and also not necessarily the method being used, or the only method being used.
If there's less content per compressed dataset file, there's going to be fewer opportunities for the compression to optimize the content to be smaller, so large similar datasets are preferable over smaller ones containing more diverse data.
This, combined with the relatively long open times per file means that programmers will want as few datasets as possible to keep the system from needing to open many files to retrieve the required data during load times, and to boost the efficiency of those compressed files to optimal levels.
If, for example, many smaller files were used, then yes, updates would be smaller. However, loading times could end up being doubled or tripled from their current timing. Given that you would, in theory, be leading data many times over (every time you load into a game or a map or something), compared to how frequently you perform updates, the right choice is to have updates take longer with more data required for download, so when you get into the game, your intra-session loads may be much faster.
With the integration of solid state storage in most modern systems, loading times have also been dramatically reduced due to the sheer speed at which files can be locked, opened, and data streamed out of them into working memory, but it's still a trade-off that needs to be taken into account. This is especially true when considering releases on PC, since PC's can have wildly different hardware and not everyone is using SSDs, or similar (fast) flash storage; perhaps on older systems or if the end user simply prefers the less expensive space available from spinning platter hard disks.
All of this must be counter balanced to provide the best possible experience for the end user and I assure you that all aspects of this process are heavily scrutinized by the people who designed the game. Often, these decisions are made early on so that the rest of the loading system can be designed around these concepts consistently, and it doesn't need to be reworked part way through the lifecycle of the game. It's very likely that even as systems and standards change, the loading system in the game will not, so if the game was designed with optimizations for hard disks (not SSDs) in mind, then that will not change until at least the next major release in that games franchise.
What isn't really excusable is when the next game from a franchise has a large overhaul, and the loading system (with all of its obsolete optimizations) is used for more modern titles; which is something I'm certain happens with most AAA studios. They reuse a lot of the existing systems and code to reduce how much work is required to go from concept to release, and hopefully shorten the duration of time (and the amount of effort required) to get to launch. Such systems should be under scrutiny at all times whenever possible, to further streamline the process and optimize it for the majority of players. If that means outlier customers trying to play the latest game on their WD green spinning disk have a worse time because they haven't purchased an SSD, when more than 90% + have at least a SATA SSD, all of whom get the benefits from the newer load system while obsolete users are detrimented because of their slow platter drives, then so be it.
But I'm starting to cross over into my opinions on it a bit more than I intended to. So I'll stop there. I hope that helps at least make sense of what's happening and why such decisions are made. As always if anyone reads this and knows more than I do, please speak up and correct me. I'm just some guy on the internet, and I'm not perfect. I don't make games, I'm not a developer. I am a systems administrator, so I see these issues constantly; I know how the subsystems work and I have a deep understanding of the underlying technology, but I haven't done any serious coding work for a long long time. I may be wrong or inaccurate on a few points and I welcome any corrections that anyone may have that they can share.
Have a good day.
I've got 2gig fiber, not 56k dialup. It's Steam's bandwidth now. They paid Valve their 30%. Why bother with insane compression that just makes it feel slow for us?
That is also a factor I do not understand. Bandwidth costs the storefront money, would Steam and others not want to decrease this load? And well done you with that fiber, you dog! I also have a fiber line but see no reason to upgrade from my tariff (150mib, i think?) that covers everything just to shave that hour of download time a year.
Nothing says fun like trying to relax and play a game . Oh no you need an update to the game...Oh did I say game I mean the custom launcher...here is our ads for our other games to click through...oh you must want to go to a webpage...whoops can't connect to online even if you don't want to play online...Ok you finally connected oh but the settings have been reset because of the update...Oh wait the cloud sync didn't work...
And when you finally get the game to run, it needs to compile shaders. Then it need to download another update, from inside the game (and sometimes even restart the game.. Looking at you, MW2! ) And the user agreement have changed so you are forced to scroll to the bottom of one or more LONG legal text before you can click "Accept". And then a season intro cutscene (fortnite and CoD games does that). Then maybe a "Whats new" screen...
I remember Commodore 64 games could take up to 30 minutes to load. But at least I could just go make some food while waiting. Didn't have to sit there and press buttons.
I think in the past the actual devs were more accessible, and their skills visible and admirable. Kind of like how video games themselves were more of a techy nerdy thing.
Today you have humongous teams with the work spread over hundreds of people. We hear from their community managers and marketing teams rather than reading the coders’ opinions. And just like the big games are more of a safe corporate product, they are more mainstream.
That last one really got me though hahaha
I love when gamers hyperfixation only on the bad examples while ignoring the existence of game companies that still do good work. Why elevate the ones doing things right when we can give all our attention to the ones doing things wrong?
I mean this is comparing modern AAA game devs with what would have been considered AAA at the time. I think it's a fair comparison in that regard, but by manpower, 90's ID might be more similar to today's New Blood.
Wild Hearts ran like ass using low preset on my same PC that ran both monster hunter world and rise just fine at 60fps high.
A CPU upgrade is my next target, but I didn't think it would get this bad in less than 5 years.
There used to be a time when game devs wrote their masterpieces using assembly. Now it's all crap Unreal Engine
Whats wrong with Unreal engine? 🤔
Most devs either don't or can't bother with proper optimization. It's a problem as old as Unreal Engine 3, at least, I remember Unreal Tournament 3 running butter smooth on relatively weak computers, while other games made with UE3 would be choppy and laggy on the same rigs, despite having less graphical clutter.
That doesn't sound like an engine problem tho
I could write a whole essay on whats wrong with UE from a players perspective. But here's the skinny.
Light Bloom, Distance Haze, TAA and Upscaling, no visual clarity, Roboto Font for 90% of all UIs, lower framerate for distant objects, no performance diffrence between highest and lowest graphical settings.
The only good looking and optimized UE games come from Epic themselves, so basically just Fortnite (RIP Paragon). Most of the games released by third parties are Primo Garbagio. They run like ass and look like ass.
Literally all of that is in control of developers. Don't blame the tools.
But UE is the common denominator for all those problems. I actually don't know any positive examples for UE. Satisfactory, maybe, but it still checks most of the issues. They are just less prevalent because the game itself is good.
Ruiner, Ghostrunner and DmC are the only UE titles I have played and they are all FLAWLESS.
predecessor is shaping up to be a good replacement for paragon. im hoping in doesnt die before they get out of early access
What's wrong with Roboto though lol? It's my favourite font
There's nothing wrong with it. It just doesn't fit everywhere. There's a thematic difference between Action platformers, Horror and Milsims, yet they all use the same font and UI. Imagine if most games would use Naughty Dogs "Yellow ledges". It would get old very quickly.
Enormous resources hog
It also has A LOT of benefits and can run very demanding games well while other engines struggle.
It's incredibly well optimized for what it's doing.
Some devs just enable raytracing and make it a requirement, to not care about properly optimized alternative lights and shadows stuff.
Doesn't sound like a game engine problem
Same as using an AI in games is not an AI problem.
Correct. If you build a house with cheap labour and bad materials it's the builders fault. That doesn't make all houses bad and unreliable.
I mean, if the world makes it very convenient to use such instruments and call the task finished, this is not okay. I wish at some point we would come to conclusion that we need to optimize the code and software products to reduce CO2 emissions or something, so devs' laziness finally becomes less tolerated.
Man, I miss the good old days.
Brian Provinciano made retro city rampage, then, crammed it into an NES cart. I don't think this argument is really valid.
Also, really, the breast milk bit? we don't want to work with females? what is that shit.
I think it is more about the harassment allegations.
Do you have any recent examples? Am genuinely curious, given that it's something that's been a problem in the game's industry for a long time, particularly at places like Activision.
Honestly, I am trying not to keep up to date on bad shit. Yeah if a company really sucks I won't support it but I aint looking that shit up.
......?
do you not understand that internal and external harassment has been a huge problem in gamedev? at many many studios?
I'm getting too involved for this meme I guess.
These types of allegations only were made public in recent years and related to recent events.
Even if harassment was an issue even in the 90s, we didn't hear about it.
Did I say anything about about these things? I just said it was about all the allegations and not about not wanting to work with females.
We are women. Not "females".
Totally, that's what I'm trying to lampoon, sorry if the sarcasm didn't come through on that aspect. I maintain my premise, there's a tremendous amount of harassment devs put up with for the 'privilege' of working in the games industry, a key aspect that makes me support unions and worker organization.
That incident happened in Activision Blizzard. One of the terrible harassments women had to suffer there.
I mostly play old games that were made before the industry went to shit. There are a few new gems every year though.
So it's outright admitting the comparison is nonsense?
No, because Rollercoaster tychoon and sharewere were AAA games back in the day.
Lol this is so stupid. All of these examples are interchangeable between "then" and "now".
Where's the shareware from now? Where's the always online single player games from then?
Look up ET for Atari. There were shitty game companies releasing shitty games back then too, it's not a new thing by any means.
They were shitty for different reasons. Notice that nowhere on this meme is "shovelware."
E.T. is always cited as the cause of the video game crash of '82, but it was really the rampart shovelware, no QA to speak of, and a lack of reviews to inform customers what was worth their money and what was absolute garbage. One bad game isn't enough to topple an entire industry; especially one that is only slightly worse than the best game ever made for the Atari.
This problem was, however, mitigated a lot by Nintendo through the late 80's and the entirety of the 90's by creating the kind of licensing agreements between publishers and the console makers that still exist today, as well as the increase in review publications. Most of the best shit (from consumer friendly practices to the games themselves) from the industry came specifically in the 90's thanks in part to actual curation of the software allowed to be sold for these systems.
At least you can easily determine shovelware from something worth your time when everything has reviews attached to the store page. Still sucks that you have to wade through all that bullshit, though.
https://steamdb.info/charts/?category=10&__cf_chl_tk=ns7vohkn16knyf_fsewm.mnjjh9ibglmkfjyrldghy4-1706223534-0-ganycgzndiu
DRM is nothing new, we just used to have to keep up with the disk or a Key. If always online was an option back then you can bet your ass game publishers would have implemented it.
It was an option back then. They just know nobody would have accepted it then because
There were still plenty of online-only games. They just had a damn good reason to be online. Always-online in single player isn't needed as DRM. There are plenty of other DRM options that don't use the internet at all or at least only check once in a while when you do have a connection to the Internet.
Jesus...ok obviously it was technically an option, but it would be suicidal in a time when not everyone had Internet in their homes and those that did had unreliable Internet. Don't be obtuse. Those limitations are largely not an issue in 2024.
I was playing video games on my homebuilt computer in the 90s. I know exactly what it was like.
So was I. And so do I.
This is referring to a real event: https://www.thegamer.com/activision-blizzard-breast-milk-stolen/
This is very meta.