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Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

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Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#31

Post by dehrmann »

yuppie_scum wrote: post #8

My thoughts: - The difference between 8 or 16 bit graphics at 320x200 30 fps and modern hdr 2k at 120 fps is orders of magnitude less data to manage. - Software developers were not abstracted as far away from the hardware as they are today. - Most games ran on DOS which was basically “bare metal” vs windows/multitasking/background processes.. - And you HAD to make efficient use of the compute and ram when dealing wit…

> Most games ran on DOS which was basically “bare metal”

Remember how games made you pick your sound card because the OS didn't provide an API for this?

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#32

Post by silisili »

I'm gonna stray a little from the norm here.

Most people seem to think programmers of yore were smarter, and generally, that's probably true -on average-. I mean, there weren't boot camps back then.

That aside though, the scene has changed. Write your super efficient perfect game, and nobody will play it. Look at Ludem Dare, and all the JSxK competitions. Those smart people still exist today.

But the landscape has changed so much, that consumers want the pretty graphics, heavy resources, social aspects. They don't care if it's 1kb or 1tb.

In short, people of yesterday were resource constrained so had to write smart hacks. People today have many more resources available, and use those. Both are using every bit of what they have available.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#33

Post by bailey1541 »

don-code wrote: post #15

These tricks are things that you could still pull off today. The difference is, outside of competitions or the demoscene, nobody _needs_ to pull them off - it greatly decreases your time-to-market to do things in a straightforward way, rather than a novel way. That wasn't true 20+ years ago - the straightforward way often brought you up against hardware limitations.

Having been a game programmer back in the day (C64, Amiga, Atari Jaguar, N64, and beyond to newer machines) I fully agree with your point.

My earliest days had the most fantastic tricks. So called game engines were useless. Now it’s the complete opposite.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#34

Post by thewileyone »

The simple answer is you have to work within the constraints you're confined in. I used to work for an ecommerce company, a very early Amazon competitor, and because the Internet was so slow in the early years, we had a rule that our homepage had to be less than 100k, including image icons. Every 1k squeezed was a success and celebrated. Even today Amazon's homepage is less than 1MB, go ahead and check.

Now with CSS frameworks, JS frameworks, ad frameworks and cross-linking, pages take forever to load with even less actual content.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#36

Post by dehrmann »

nemo44x wrote: post #35
dehrmann wrote: post #27

I wonder how many years ahead a game using optimization tricks would look compared to a game without that focus.

Modern game libraries very much use “tricks” in critical paths as far as resources are concerned.

I'll count this as modern: GTA San Andreas not having any zones was pretty impressive.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#37

Post by wly_cdgr »

silisili wrote: post #32

I'm gonna stray a little from the norm here. Most people seem to think programmers of yore were smarter, and generally, that's probably true -on average-. I mean, there weren't boot camps back then. That aside though, the scene has changed. Write your super efficient perfect game, and nobody will play it. Look at Ludem Dare, and all the JSxK competitions. Those smart people still exist today. But the landscape has ch…

Players have always cared a lot about graphics. Descent looked fckin amazing in 1995

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#38

Post by roenxi »

The major difference is probably the kind of game being produced. There is a reason DF starts out running smoothly and eventually hits CPU death. I'm not certain what the reason is these days, but it used to be something like pathfinding combined with polynomial explosions in how a dwarf chooses their next job.

Old-school games would have been forced to redesign the game so that that wasn't a problem that gets faced. For example, none of the games you list try to simulate a deep 3d space with complex pathfinding. Warcraft II I know quite well and the maps are small.

One of the reasons systems used to be highly efficient was evolutionary - it was impossible to make resource-heavy games, so people kept iterating until they found good concepts that didn't require polynomial scaling algorithms with moderate-large N inputs.

Re: Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?

#40

Post by dehrmann »

smoldesu wrote: post #21

This is probably an unsatisfying answer, but simply put, a lot of systems these days are just bloated. I'm not only talking about the OS/programs running (though it often contributes), but rather the creature comforts developers have taken on over the years in the name of productivity. In fairness, the scale of recent games wouldn't be quite so possible without our superfluous tooling, but it definitely comes at a co…

> Java...a great tool for prototyping, but when it came to delivering a high-performance product it often fell short.

I think this only been said in the context of games.

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