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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?

#71

Post by adventured »

thewileyone wrote: post #34

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…

> Even today Amazon's homepage is less than 1MB, go ahead and check.

Pingdom reports 4.8mb (3.3mb of images), 661ms to load, and 298 requests.

GT Metrix reports 2.65mb (2mb of images), and 307 requests.

An incognito window with Firefox on my system says ~3mb and ~265 requests. Just the top six or seven media assets combined that loaded initially weigh in at about 1mb.

Certainly not the worst page ever, granted.

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

#72

Post by egypturnash »

Lower resolutions on smaller monitors. 256 colors at a time, no truecolor yet.

Lower-res samples, if any.

Lower framerate expectations - try playing Descent 2 on an emulated computer with similar specs to the lowest specs suggested on the box. Even one in the middle of the spec range probably didn't get a constant 60fps.

More hand-tuned assembly (RCT was famously 99% assembly, according to Wikipedia; this was starting to be unusual but people who'd been in the industry a while probably did at last one game in 100% assembly, and would have been pretty comfortable with hand-optimizing stuff as needed).

Simpler worlds, with simpler AI. Victory conditions designed to be reached before the number of entities in the game overwhelmed the CPU completely.

Simpler models. Most 3d games you play now probably have more polygons in your character's weapon than Descent would have in the entire level and all the active entities; they certainly have more polys in the overall character.

I mean, really, three million tiles? That's insane by that day's standards, that's a bit more than 1700x1700 tiles, a quick search tells me the maximum map size in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 was 256x256, and it's a fairly safe assumption that RCT1 was, at best, the same size, if not probably smaller. I can't find anything similar for Sim City 2000 but I would be surprised if it was much bigger.

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

#73

Post by swiley »

uncomputation wrote: post #68

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 sin…

Also the gameboy is effectively a game engine in hardware form. It's way easier to write the little bit of code to glue the hardware objects to your internal entities/game logic than to write engines from scratch on modern hardware.

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

#74

Post by TacticalCoder »

jpgvm wrote: post #69
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.

> 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.

Indeed...

Ultima IV, Ultima V and then "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy" (on the Atari ST) comes to mind in my case.

There were, not arguably, but factually, more complex game than 99.5% of the games produced today.

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

#75

Post by andromaton »

zekrioca wrote: post #54
dreyfan wrote: post #16

Broadly speaking, modern developers don’t have to deal with resource limitations (neither computing nor financial) so they instead devote that extra energy on completely unnecessary orchestration systems and build toolchains to feel like they’re doing something complex and challenging.

Developers “didn’t feel like”, they were actually doing something complex, given the limitations of that time and context.

Im not sure i understand, but I can tell you it felt good when one learned that setting the stack pointer and using push and pop was faster than using register indirect addressing, bit twiddling to avoid multiplying or dividing, and fitting a mm/dd/yy on 14 bits. Constraints fuels a certain type of creativity. This is not absent today, but less frequent.

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

#76

Post by dreyfan »

zekrioca wrote: post #54
dreyfan wrote: post #16

Broadly speaking, modern developers don’t have to deal with resource limitations (neither computing nor financial) so they instead devote that extra energy on completely unnecessary orchestration systems and build toolchains to feel like they’re doing something complex and challenging.

Developers “didn’t feel like”, they were actually doing something complex, given the limitations of that time and context.

Right. I think it's mostly subconscious. If you crank out CRUD app or some basic FPS in Unity, you're left wanting more and turn to the toolchain to find that complexity. 25 years ago, devs had no unmet craving after optimizing netcode for an 8-player game with 28.8k users or implementing another soundcard API by hand.

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

#77

Post by domlebo70 »

uncomputation wrote: post #68

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 sin…

This holds true for 99% of Game Boy games fyi. Afaik not many games were written in C during the actual release years.

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

#78

Post by smallstepforman »

I’ve created a 4k UHD video editor for Haiku OS (https://github.com/smallstepforman/Medo), it’s a C++17 native app, with over 30 OpenGL GLSL effect plugins and addons, multi threaded Actor model, over 10 user languages, and the entire package file fits on a 1.44Mb floppy disk with space to spare. If I was really concerned about space, I could probably replace all .png resources with WebP and save another 200kb.

How is it so small? No external dependancies (uses stock Haiku packages), uses the standard C++ system API, and written by a developer that learned their trade on restrained systems from the 80’s. Look at the old Amiga stuff from that era.

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

#79

Post by crate_barre »

thewileyone wrote: post #34

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…

Hit the nail on the head. Constraints fuel creativity and innovation. If I give you everything, then what do you have left to do?

It’s like the General that wins every battle because he has the most elite soldiers. Could the General win with a rag tag shoddy group of soldiers?

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