Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by Dracophoenix » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

bailey1541 wrote: post #33

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.

What did you program on the N64? And which among those platforms was was your favorite?

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

#62

Post by muzani » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:12 AM UTC

A nice talk on this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk

The short of it is that game devs used to write code for the hardware as well. Most code now is written for a layer in between, but now there's so many layers that code is unreliable and slow.

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

#63

Post by throwawaygh » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:14 AM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #53

yes, it is possible to be that efficient now, but there is little incentive to do so. it is far easier, and faster, to use a library that is bad than to write what you need efficiently. "CPU is cheap." "RAM is cheap." two of the many cancerous sayings that developers use to excuse their poor efforts. we don't do this now because we simply do not care enough as an industry. we want the software written immediately and…

It's not just money.

Security is another reason. Buffer overflows are a thing of the past in application code except in very special cases (or silly tech stack choices).

But even if it were just money, so what? Time is money, buddy. I can be home to my family sooner by spending a few MB of your RAM. Sorry not sorry.

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

#64

Post by rasz » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:16 AM UTC

There are no tricks, you just have to give up mountains of levels of abstraction accumulated over the years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge3aKEmZcqY

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

#65

Post by sgtnoodle » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:18 AM UTC

sushsjsuauahab wrote: post #49

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is my favourite. I would call this kind of programming both art and beauty.

If I remember correctly the two main hacks were making draw lists such that only certain polygon faces were rendered based on Crash's xyz position (the theory being that it isnt possible for other faces to be seen from that location), and also that he removed functions/files from Sony's standard C libs on the PS1 SDK?

They realized that untextured polygons were way faster to draw than textured ones, so rather than texture the Crash model, they cranked up the polygon count and simply colored them. Often times, the triangles were on the same order of size as the pixels. It also avoided the playstation's lack of perspective correction on textures. It both made the character look gorgeous for the day, and made the code run faster.

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

#66

Post by TacticalCoder » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

Hard disagree with many comments here.

For ennemies AI, ok: we made progress. But for human-vs-human gameplays, we basically had everything in the nineties.

Warcraft II over Kali (to simulate a LAN over the Internet for Warcraft II didn't have battle.net) was basically the gameplay of Warcraft III reforged. Half-Life and then it's counterstrike mod were basically the FPS of today.

Diablo II (development for Windows 1995 started in 1997 and game came out in 2000, so not 2000 per se but nearly) was basically so perfect from a collaborative gameplay point of view and was the perfect "hack n slash" game.

It was so perfect that a few weeks ago Blizzard released the exact same game, with an identical gameplay, even down to most bugs (some were fixed, like the eth armor upgrade bug). It's the same game, but with modern looking graphics.

Games were so good that more than two decades later you can re-release the exact same gameplay with updated graphics.

That's how perfect things already were.

So very hard disagree that "games had simpler gameplay".

Many game genre back then had already reached perfection from the gameplay point the view.

Since then we added shiny.

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

#67

Post by paulmd » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

whynotmaybe wrote: post #60

Check this https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

nostalgia neurons activated, I can't see this and not think of Terminal Velocity aka Microsoft Fury3

oh, right, I own that on GOG (I buy more than I can play unfortunately). Guess I know what I'm doing tonight.

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

#68

Post by uncomputation » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

So many great responses in this thread, but I’ll just throw it out there that the original Pokémon games for GameBoy were in hand-written assembly specific to the GameBoy. I would imagine “back then” the programmers had limited memory and thus more obvious constraints. It’s probably possible to recreate this level of efficiency nowadays but both the number of platforms and the expectations of gaming have exploded since the 90s. Not to mention the question if it is even profitable to do so. Back then, it wasn’t a matter of “efficient,” it was “will this run at all on the amount of memory we have?”

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

#69

Post by jpgvm » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #66

Hard disagree with many comments here. For ennemies AI, ok: we made progress. But for human-vs-human gameplays, we basically had everything in the nineties. Warcraft II over Kali (to simulate a LAN over the Internet for Warcraft II didn't have battle.net) was basically the gameplay of Warcraft III reforged. Half-Life and then it's counterstrike mod were basically the FPS of today. Diablo II (development for Windows 1…

Not to mention some of the games back then had vastly more complexity because it wasn't as necessary for every game to have universal appeal on account of much smaller budgets.

I think the golden age of games is behind us but I'm looking forward to a new golden age of VR/AR sometime in my lifetime.

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

#70

Post by johnebgd » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

silisili wrote: post #58

wly_cdgr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The last game I was big into was Q1. When GLQuake came out, it felt like I was in the future. Compare GLQuake to even some indy game today and it looks awful. You're right - expectations change and most everything else is nostalgia.

I had an Xbox hooked up around 2002 at a friends house (high school years for me) and their father commented that Dead or Alive looked like a movie to them. They didn’t know how games could look more realistic.

Crazy how far we have come since then.