startrek.website

MudMan, do gaming w Then vs Now
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

Ellvix,
@Ellvix@lemmy.world avatar

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.

WarmSoda,

SoundBlaster.

So glad things like that are the past.

MudMan, (edited )
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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

SgtAStrawberry,

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.

MudMan, (edited )
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

SgtAStrawberry,

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.

TexasDrunk,

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.

NOPper,

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.

snf,

set blaster=a220 i7 d1 h5 t6

Honytawk,

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.

groet,

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.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

CheeseNoodle,

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.

EldritchFeminity,

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.

Klear,

GTA San Andreas has an option to uncap the framerate on PC, which outright breaks certain mechanics.

Speculater,
@Speculater@lemmy.world avatar

Sounds like Commander Keen?

Edit: I meant Wing Commander

chrizzowski,

Damn there’s a throwback. Annnnd I feel old now hah.

Ellvix,
@Ellvix@lemmy.world avatar

That’s it! Wing Commander!

tiredofsametab,

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.

notfromhere,

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.

massive_bereavement,
@massive_bereavement@kbin.social avatar

Ecco the dolphin was made specifically hard to ensure people couldn't beat it on rental during a weekend.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

WarmSoda,

Pink Floyds welcome to the machine still gives me flashbacks to the last stage of Ecco 1.

SpaceNoodle,

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.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

LeftHandedWave,

…memory used to be extremely expensive…

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!

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

SpaceNoodle,

20 GB during the 386 era does not check out for home PCs.

limelight79,

20 megs maybe.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

Hah. Yeah, I meant 20 megs. My muscle memory just doesn't want to type a number that low, it seems.

scutiger,

20 MB is more realistic for that era.

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

because games textures are HUGE

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”

MudMan, (edited )
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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

TrickDacy,
@TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

CDs could do 500 Mb

It was actually 700 MB

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

TrickDacy,
@TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

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.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

SpaceNoodle,

You really seem to be misremembering again, since the original CD spec could hold 650 MiB of data.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

SpaceNoodle,

Well now you’re changing the conversation to CD-R, not just CD.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

No, I'm... correcting myself. That's how correcting a statement works, you make a new statement. Read my previous comment carefully.

CodexArcanum,

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.

sukhmel,

Seems like a golden era of running everything in ring 0, although that wasn’t called like this then, afaik

snf,

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.

amio,

I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes

Same, in my case as a European. PAL is weird.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

peyotecosmico,

I remember that for MegaMan we needed to turn off the turbo (yes the CPU button) or it ran really fast.

StephniBefni,

Maybe the opposite, the turbo button actually slowed down the CPU so you could play games that had a speed limit.

frezik,

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.

tiredofsametab,

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.

MudMan,
@MudMan@kbin.social avatar

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.

paholg,

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.

TSG_Asmodeus,

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.

Norgur, do gaming w It was a lively, bustling major city... of about 12 people and 1 chicken.

Civil "war": the mighty Empire and the heroic Sotrmcloaks deployed their vast armies and the clash of the 12 guys began!

BolexForSoup, (edited )
@BolexForSoup@kbin.social avatar

deleted_by_author

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  • Blamemeta,

    One racist drunk dude in Windhelm, vs the Imperials committing a religious genocide.

    I swear you guys haven’t actually played the game and are just parrotting each other.

    MindSkipperBro12,

    Stormcloaks got what they fucking deserve!

    Blamemeta,

    By Talos, me and Lydia will fuck you up bro! You’ll never leave here alive!

    (Mods chill, “You’ll never leave here alive” is from Skyrim)

    frickineh,

    Look, everyone hates the Thalmor, but a lot of Nords treat every other race like hot garbage. The khajit aren’t even allowed in the cities and people never stop talking shit when I play as an elf. It’s not just Ulfric, and the game makes it pretty clear.

    Blamemeta,

    Every race treats every other race with disdain. There is no high ground with the Imperials or the Thalmor.

    The_Picard_Maneuver,
    @The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website avatar

    By the end of this bloody battle, there were bodies strewn as far as the (severely nearsighted) eye could see.

    DragonTypeWyvern,

    All killed by one dude who admittedly kept complaining about the “difficulty slider just giving them too much HP”

    Gabu,

    Engine and hardware limitations of the time. With Skyrim SE and mods, you can actually get a hundred or so soldiers in there without crashing.

    Limonene, do gaming w Has also maintained an active playerbase for 1500+ years

    >not a single balance update since the 8th century

    You’re just begging AnarchyChess to correct you.

    The_Picard_Maneuver,
    @The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website avatar

    They’re going to tell me to google something. I can feel it.

    dependencyinjection,

    You should only be Googling things en passant, and not hang around too long.

    I’ll show myself out.

    The_Picard_Maneuver,
    @The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website avatar

    Holy hell

    Rubanski,

    New response just dropped

    A7thStone,

    Call the exorcist

    toroknos_07,

    Lemmy.world suffers an outage, doesn’t come back

    funkless_eck,

    I set a cron job to do it, now I’m free

    nadiaraven,

    OK, I looked it up on Wikipedia. The bishop and queen were the last to have their moves set changed to the modern form in the 15th or 16th century. But even since then there have been some tweaks, such as the 3 move and 50 move rules for draws, and the orientation of the board. So you could maybe argue no balancing since the 16th century, and only a few bug fixes after that.

    ColeSloth,

    En passant wasn’t even added until 1880.

    PotatoKat,

    More of a hotfix than a balance update imo

    fkn,

    What’s en passant?

    ColeSloth,

    It’s French for “in passing”. It’s a special move for taking a pawn with another pawn, if the first pawn tries using its double space first move to go past an enemy pawn.

    fkn,

    Woosh

    ColeSloth,

    Are you like an idiot or something? You actually thought asking “what’s en passant?” Was going to come across as funny or sarcastic? Do you actually think everyone knows what en passant is? Most people don’t know how to play chess, yet you think asking what en passant is, is some sort of witty thing? Moron.

    fkn,

    Now I am confused about if you get the joke or not.

    Kethal,

    Someone failing to recognize a niche joke from a small community is not a whoosh. And of course he doesn’t get the joke. Because it’s a niche joke from a small community.

    fkn,

    Wow. Heaven forbid I used a joke from the largest online chess influencers following when there are multiple threads on this post from the same community…

    Kethal,

    No one said you can’t make jokes. It was only pointed out that someone not getting a joke from your insular club isn’t a whoosh.

    fkn,

    The whoosh is part of the joke… Which apparently you didn’t know. Also, it isn’t insular. It’s literally the opposite of that. I thought they were participating in the joke until they replied in such a negative way.

    I don’t understand why you are so upset about this and why you are so derogatory towards what is potentially the largest generation of chess players proportionally to their generation size to have ever existed.

    Kethal,

    I don’t feel that I’ve been derogatory or acted upset. I’ve explained that people are not likely to know an inside joke. That’s what inside jokes are. And if part of an inside joke involves mocking someone, then you’d certainly hope that the jokester would be confident that the other person was in on the joke. And if it turned out the other person didn’t get it, you’d hope that the jokester would apologize and politely explain the joke - not act like everyone else is the problem.

    It’s great that there are a lot of people that like chess. I assure you though, that by far, the majority of those people do not have any idea about your joke, from a tiny part of the chess community.

    fkn,

    If you feel you have not been derogatory, please reconsider your language usage in the future.

    Kethal,

    Someone took the time to answer your question, then you mocked them. That’s derogatory. Then after having it explained what you did wrong, you blame everyone but yourself. Choose your own words more carefully.

    fkn,

    Wait, I am sorry… when, after the meme ending did I mock them? Like I said earlier I thought they were playing a bit until they reacted so negatively.

    Kethal,

    I just want to point out here that I haven’t downvoted a single one of your comments. That’s other people weighing in on this.

    I’ve already explained it and repeating myself would be pointless. Reflect.

    fkn,

    Excellent. It looks like we both explained ourselves. You appear to understand my position, and when I ask for clarification further on yours you tell me that it is my fault. Thanks for pointing out my flaws without clarification.

    lordmauve,

    Yeah, chess was really hard when the board had to be vertical. Horizontal orientation was a huge improvement to the player experience.

    ColeSloth,

    Castle was put in place around the 17th century, and en passant wasn’t put into the rules until 1880. Both were balance issues being solved.

    quams69, do gaming w Im still undecided about if it looks fun though

    It’s significantly more fun than any recent pokemon game and its not exclusive to a console. It’s fantastic for an early access release

    Funkmaster-Hex,

    Agreed. Not really for kids though. It has a different vibe. I liken it to a tamer version of Animal Crossing v. Cult of the Lamb.

    Daxtron2,

    I justify it as even if it never receives an update, I’m still satisfied with what I paid for it. It’s brought me and my friend many hours of fun.

    blanketswithsmallpox,

    A lot of early access stuff popping lately. I’m seeing Enshrouded a bunch too.

    Please don’t let there be a mass early access thing again. Waiting two years for a complete game ruins the fun sometimes.

    I could see why PalWorld would do it early though before the cease and desist letters come en masse from Nintendo.

    Coreidan,

    Huh? Early access games have been a thing for at least the past 5 years solid, no question. At this point it’s just a standard. It’s rare to find a game come out that isn’t early release. The trend isn’t going away because there will always be a line of morons to buy the game full of bugs and people lap it up.

    Gigasser,

    It can help some indie studios out with continued development, so I think it’s fine as long as they continue to refine the game and put out timely updates. Some games even feel finished already even if they technically aren’t.

    Coreidan,

    I agree there is a place for it. However it’s heavily abused by the industry to make an extra buck at the expense of the consumers

    Death_Equity,

    They definitely needed the cash flow to keep going. I think the other part of their early access, aside from public testing, is they needed a target. It feels like they had an idea for a game but didn’t know how to flesh out the game. Just like Minecraft, the community will heavily influence the dev. That community feedback before a full release is a good thing and it will make Pal’mon an iconic game if the devs can deliver.

    Kedly,

    Early Access has its place, we’re far better off with it existing than it not. I do still feel it needs to be an opt in thing for you to be able to see on Steam though

    blanketswithsmallpox,

    It just always feels like you lose so much of the cultural zeitgeist when the game goes full release.

    Slime Rancher. Eventually Valheim. 30XX. My Time At… it’s like a tepid glass of water rather than hitting that nice ice cold cube glass like you’re trying to get in my pants.

    Kedly,

    Yeah it dilutes their release hype, but a lot of these games might also have not released at ALL had Early Access not existed in some form

    Sheeple,
    @Sheeple@lemmy.world avatar

    It’s worse because this particular company has a habit of doing a bunch of unfinished games. Palworld, Craftopia and Never grave are all by the same company. They’re all also unfinished.

    Pocketpair is also 100% not an indie company as the head of Pocketpair is already a Businessman who owns an exchange for cryptocurrency

    arefx,

    It’s also just a really good survival game.

    Grass,

    I feel like recent pokemon is a low hurdle

    Duamerthrax,

    Pokemon fans should appreciate Palworld just because it may force Gamefreak to stop fucking around.

    LifeOfChance,

    It won’t. Pokemon is such a guaranteed money maker they won’t sway far off the path and this is ESPECIALLY true when you look at Japan where they have entire cities made around the stuff. Pokemon outside of Japan is nothing when compared to what it is over there. Palworld was also released outside of a pokemon release so it isn’t going to really effect their sales either. Gamefreak and Nintendo are probably gonna have issues with how it certainly pulls inspiration from a new titles.

    With all that said I really enjoy palworld it’s loads of fun and I usually hate survival games.

    Sheeple,
    @Sheeple@lemmy.world avatar

    It’s exclusive to PC and XBox just FYI. They have a contract going on with Microsoft that forbids them from releasing to other platforms.

    Wilzax, do gaming w Then vs Now

    “Then” is just indie today.

    RandomStickman,
    @RandomStickman@kbin.social avatar

    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.

    ZILtoid1991,
    @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social avatar

    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."

    yamanii,
    @yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    SomeonePrime,

    Por que no los dos?

    ZILtoid1991,
    @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social avatar

    I didn't even mention the plagiarism stuff here, which was likely due to the creators learning monster design only from Pokémon.

    SuddenDownpour,

    Nothing wrong with spending Patreon money on a sexdoll.

    ZILtoid1991,
    @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social avatar

    It is when you're supposed to work on your game.

    CulturedLout,

    He was working on his game. The sex doll only turns him down half the time now.

    SuddenDownpour,

    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.

    Wilzax,

    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

    rambaroo,

    The meme does specify AAA

    Wilzax,

    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

    Localhorst86, do gaming w Ok, is this the best one yet? How do we top this?

    The mantra “Doom runs on anything” means the game should be executed by the device in question.
    Here, this is not the case, the gut bacteria only acts as a display.

    They should have let it play “bad apple” instead.

    Caesium,

    I love how bad apple is the doom of animation. it’s a fun rabbit hole to dive into whenever utube recommends me one

    funnystuff97,

    That’s the case for a lot of the “doom runs on it” ones, like that pregnancy test. But I like the idea that if it can compute, it can run Doom; if it can display, it can play Bad Apple.

    Skullgrid, do gaming w Then vs Now
    @Skullgrid@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    mossy_,

    I miss when games used to be good. Anyone 'member Vampire Survivors, Lethal Company, Bug Fables? Developers these days just can’t compare.

    Skullgrid,
    @Skullgrid@lemmy.world avatar

    now that’s survivor bias

    EDIT : here’s the fun thing, Lethal company would have been a mod back in the day

    mossy_,

    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?

    Skullgrid,
    @Skullgrid@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    mossy_,

    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!”

    Skullgrid,
    @Skullgrid@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    Acters,

    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.

    bob_lemon,

    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.

    Skullgrid,
    @Skullgrid@lemmy.world avatar

    the tools these days make it basically the same to work a mod or an inde game.

    nublug, do gaming w How can it be so bad?

    heroic games launcher is a foss epic and gog launcher, works very well and very fast for me on linux. it has a windows version, too.

    pennomi,

    Oh this is very cool. Thanks for pointing me in this direction

    MrGerrit,

    Can recommend. Have it on my steam deck and PC. Runs great.

    Tippon,

    I didn’t know it had a Windows version. Thanks for the heads up 👍

    beebarfbadger, do gaming w I've got a bad feeling about this

    Now that streaming services have invented cable again, games reinvent arcades.

    massacre,

    To the top for you!

    spittingimage, do gaming w I've got a bad feeling about this
    @spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

    Well, I believe that game publishers should be forced to work in vats filled to shoulder height with whale semen. Probably best for everyone if neither of us get our way.

    Skyline969,
    @Skyline969@lemmy.ca avatar

    Shoulder height? So lenient. Give them a snorkel - one, to share - and fully submerge them.

    Death_Equity,

    It’s quite rude to get semen in someone’s hair. We can be better than our hate compels us to be.

    pandacoder,

    How about body and facial hair? The faith would need to be only a couple millimeters.

    mathematicalMagpie, do gaming w Then vs Now

    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.

    WalrusDragonOnABike,

    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.

    oatscoop,

    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.

    jol,

    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.

    frezik,

    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.

    Buck,

    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.

    frezik,

    Not really. We have more bugs because there are more lines of code.

    Klear,

    And fewer lines of coke.

    TheBat,
    @TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

    DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

    orphiebaby,

    I vaguely remember this. What is it from again?

    Karyoplasma, (edited )

    You will probably enjoy this video: 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.

    Buck,

    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.

    Croquette,

    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.

    turmacar,

    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.

    frezik,

    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.

    psmgx,

    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.

    TSG_Asmodeus,

    Stunt Race FX really stood out to me, even now I remember being impressed by the visuals.

    adam_y,
    @adam_y@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    breckenedge, do gaming w I truly don't know how to explain this to anyone who wasn't around then without them thinking we were out of our minds.

    The moment GMan’s mouth fucking moved in Half Life when he talked. 🤯

    Misconduct,

    I still remember the first time a character’s feet lined up when they walked up stairs. Couldn’t believe it lol. I wish I could remember what game it was but it was SO long ago. I do remember later being similarly impressed by MGS2 stairs

    DangedIfYouDid,

    The weather effects and condensation on Samus’s visor in Metroid Prime had this same feeling. It’s been quite a while since such minor graphical details in a game held me in such awe.

    UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT,

    Going back even farther I remember my mind being blown when the rain in Ninja Gaiden on nes changed directions

    baropithecus, do gaming w Has also maintained an active playerbase for 1500+ years

    White is OP, known issue since 1889 and devs haven’t addressed it. Dead game

    udon,

    Possible quick fix: Switch from turn-based to real time mode

    dustyData,

    Isn’t that just 1 second bullet?

    Sinistar,

    I was thinking Kung Fu Chess

    HerbalGamer,
    @HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works avatar

    jfc

    slazer2au, do gaming w Im still undecided about if it looks fun though

    It is fun. Of you played Ark it has the same vibes minus the 12 hours of berry hasting to catch one Dino.

    arefx,

    It’s better than ark.

    HerbalGamer,
    @HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works avatar

    From what I’ve seen, it’s like Ark + Breath of the Wild.

    Swedneck,
    @Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    they basically just looked at the recent popular games and yoinked the good bits, which entirely unsurprisingly results in a fun game when executed decently

    like honestly palworld feels like something that should be used as an example in game design courses: this is what it looks like when you just set out to make a successful game, without any particular vision. Resist the whisperings of satan telling you to add microtransactions and charge 60 bucks for it, and people will eat that shit up

    keefshape,

    That’s my biggest standout point too. They choreograph exactly what points of the game could be micro transacted… And then they don’t.

    Purple tech could be paywalled. Would be by most modern game standards.

    They did not. They have my thanks for that.

    Swedneck,
    @Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    and like, that decision has probably earned them way more money than they would ever have seen otherwise, along with the sustainability to KEEP earning hideous amounts of dosh for a good long while

    discostjohn,

    As much as it pains me to agree with you, I think I agree with you.

    starman2112, (edited )
    @starman2112@sh.itjust.works avatar

    As someone who spent tens, maybe hundreds of hours on ark… It’s so much more fun than ark. I have some good memories from that game, but it’s so not worth logging in every single day to feed the dinosaurs

    Quetzalcutlass,

    It’s Ark, but with all the terrible mechanics and blatant playtime stretching removed. The longest anything takes in Palworld with default settings is hatching a large egg, which is entirely passive and caps at 2 hours on Normal (according to the settings page, but I’ve yet to see a hatch timer longer than 30 minutes), and even that can be greatly sped up by matching the egg’s preferred climate with a heater or cooler next to the incubator. Most things that require player intervention take minutes at most. After Ark’s “this basic task takes hours, you have to be there for the whole process, and any mistake means you might as well start over”, this game is a breath of fresh air.

    Definitely room for growth though, especially on the automation and AI side of things. Even in its current state it’s still one of the best survival games I’ve played in years. Between it and Enshrouded, 2024 has already spoiled me.

    Sheeple,
    @Sheeple@lemmy.world avatar

    Lmao you clearly haven’t played Ark.

    dev_null,

    I played Ark, got a random disease that apparently can only be healed with items from a high level area and didn’t go away on death. So my options were: play with the disease for the foreseeable future or restart from scratch and lose days of progress.

    I chose to uninstall.

    jpreston2005, do gaming w Chasing the *frag*on

    For me it was Nintendo 64, Goldeneye sleepover party. Pure, unbridled, unadulterated happiness. A time with what felt like genuine acceptance and kindness.

    criitz,

    Amen brother

    troyunrau,
    @troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

    I still dream about those parties. We would gather in the youth centre, supervised, with a digital projector borrowed from the school (with permission), in sleeping bags, lying on the floor, projecting onto the roof, staying up until 4am…

    Slappers only, no Oddjob. ;)

    No, usually it was: autoaim off, pistols, one-hit-kills, no Oddjob.

    The_Picard_Maneuver,
    @The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website avatar

    Projecting onto the roof is pure genius!

    troyunrau,
    @troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

    The youth centre was an old church (that the church had outgrown). So it had a huge white gabled roof at exactly the right angle for comfort. Was a blast

    TWeaK,

    Goldeneye was classic, but Perfect Dark was always better IMO.

    Man, I wish Rare never sold themselves to Microsoft. They tried to get Nintendo involved and start a bidding war, but Nintendo didn’t bite. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is still perhaps my favourite game of all time, all the timely movie references, and the juxtoposition of a cutesy squirrel character actually being a hungover reprobate. I played so much of that teddies v French squirrels on the beach landing multiplayer.

    jballs,
    @jballs@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Will just leave this here for you… dsogaming.com/…/an-unofficial-pc-port-of-nintendo…

    TWeaK,

    Got one of them links to the ROM?

    jballs,
    @jballs@sh.itjust.works avatar

    I don’t ,sorry

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