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
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.
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.
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.
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).
“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
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.
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.
I decided about 10 years ago that I just can’t afford to keep updating my computer every couple of years just so I can play new titles. So now I just play old titles. And if you play old enough titles, you don’t even have to go to a torrent site. You can go directly to the Internet Archive.
I keep rediscovering games I loved when I was younger. I’ve been playing Skyroads lately. I still love the music. You know how long it takes to load Skyroads on a computer from 2015? I have no idea either because it loads faster than I can measure time.
This has been your lecture from a crotchety old man.
Tested 5 clients on my PC 3 times each. Times were more or less consistent on each run, biggest variation seemed for Uplay.
Setup: You are already logged in, there are no pending updates, you terminate client after each run (did not see significant time difference between repeated runs and 1st run after you log in), your logged in Windows account has admin rights so time is not wasted entering password (EGS and Uplay require admin rights to launch), time stops once launcher is usable.
EGS - 8 - 10 seconds
Steam - 20 seconds
GOG - 11 seconds
Uplay - 20 - 24 seconds
Heroic - 5 seconds
System: Ryzen 2600 with Samsung 970 EVO (2400 MB/s R/W as per Samsung Magician benchmark)
Really exposing the Valve fanboyism in the room. Steam genuinely takes quite a long time to start. People pretend it’s quick because they leave it running, while cold booting Epic/alternatives and complaining.
I find the video from LTT kinda hilarious with the 96 core threadripper. Breaking records in cinebench but Cities Skylines 2 still runs like shit (in a 1mio pop city).
Because chances are the 7800X3D will be faster due to the cache.
Real-world applications often can only be parallelized so and so much, before you start hitting diminishing returns for many reasons. A lot of it is about the actual technical design as much as it is the technical execution (you can’t parallelize two operations if one depends on the result of the other).
That’s the point I think. I haven’t delved into the specifics too much but the 7800X3D favors big cache sizes (at all layers iirc) over cores/threads quantity. So, it should fare better with games that aren’t very optimized for multi threading (ie, most games)
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