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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
startrek.website
Najstarsze