How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
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Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#2If you haven't read the "Making Crash Bandicoot" blogposts, you're in for a treat.
http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#3Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world.
We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite impressive.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#4Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…
" the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world."
I don't think there is a dichtomy. It's always about smartly leveraging available resources. The problem with modern development perhaps is then that there are these tempting high level orthodoxies that often obscure the core matter at hand. Ie. focusing on some pointless candied abstract object interface rather than focusing design efforts on data flow and the datastructures and algorithms used.
The need for low level optimization has most definetly not vanished. When program data fits into local ram the bottleneck moves into cache optimization.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#5Multiple orders of magnitude less artwork. Multiple orders of magnitude less polygons in models. This would explain a lot of the size difference.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#6Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…
Just try to code for mobile or embedded platforms.
Yeah they might get bigger storage every year, but the reason why Google, Apple and Microsoft do talks about package size on their developer conferences is that size is number one reason for people to avoid installing apps, or to chose which one to remove.
Also given how the app life cycle works on mobile platforms, big apps are being killed all the time they go into background.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#7Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…
There are some abstractions, like TCP sockets, that I don't think anyone would leave behind. But language abstractions like "classes" or even "functions" are certainly worth digging into. (The new lambda feature in Java 8 is an interesting case - you don't have to get into C to see the complexity there, but rather the bytecode, which is a kind of abstract sort of assembly.)
I'm not terribly familiar with the scene, but there are a variety of competitions for fun and art that operate within highly constrained environments. The demoscene[0], and computer golf[1], come to mind (although ironically computer golf is in some sense has to be very high level). There's also the security scene, which is quite bit-fiddly.
It's also the case that Go and particularly Rust are quite low-level system languages at their heart, so are presumably amenable to running in constrained environments.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
[1] E.g. Rhoscript http://rhoscript.com/
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#8Sounds impressive.
Might also be interested to know that the PS1 version of the first Ridge Racer ran completely from RAM (aside from music tracks): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_models#Net_Yaroze
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#9Pretty amazing what kind of skills game development required back then. One side of me is happy that we have all these great tools today, the other is sad because you hardly use this low level stuff in todays software development world. We are solving different problems today, but the level of software development skills required for a game that today could be done by a single person in Unity in a few weeks is quite…
Making an (state of the art) engine is no easier. Making a game is only easier because the engines are more available now than they were in the past.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#10Sounds impressive. Might also be interested to know that the PS1 version of the first Ridge Racer ran completely from RAM (aside from music tracks): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_models#Net_Yaroze
Ridge Racer was such a great game and always felt so smooth to me and now I know why. Thanks for this fact! :)