How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1 • Hacker News Board

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#11

Post by codesushi42 » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 8:53 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #6

kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty 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…

Not so sure about this. Most mobile games are developed with Unity. And what appear to be the cutting edge titles are usually using the Unreal engine. There's not much "to the metal" coding going on.

Besides, most mobile games are being played by the casual crowd. Games don't need graphics that push hardware limits to sell.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#12

Post by codesushi42 » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 8:59 AM UTC

Pretty awesome. Goes to show the great lengths taken even on state of the art hardware at the time.

And the PS1 wasn't even the worst of it. The Sega Saturn and N64 were both considerably more difficult to develop for. And the PC market was terribly fragmented and had a high rate of obsolescence.

This stuff can give you nightmares: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~antime/sega/docs.html

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#13

Post by MojoJolo » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:00 AM UTC

mianos wrote: post #5

Multiple orders of magnitude less artwork. Multiple orders of magnitude less polygons in models. This would explain a lot of the size difference.

But it also has multiple orders of magnitude less in terms of memory. So they have so little or no room for excess.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#14

Post by iNerdier » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:09 AM UTC

Dave Bagget could write a book on the making of crash and I'd buy it in a second. There was something very special that went to making that game and I was just the right age to appreciate it.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#15

Post by NickPollard » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:13 AM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty 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…

A good portion of this stuff does still go on in Games Development.

I don't work in games any more, but on the last title I worked on (Forza Horizon, Xbox 360), one of my colleagues engaged in a very similar exercise in order to allow data for the open world to be streamed in quick enough to deal with car (travelling at potentially 150+mph) to drive through the world without having to wait for loads, whilst streaming direct from the DVD (we weren't allowed to install to the HDD).

Given that the world was open and you could drive in pretty much any direction, trying to pre-load the right tiles of the world was difficult, and seek times made it tough to bring stuff in if it wasn't all packed together. However we were almost at the limit of DVD capacity so we couldn't do much duplication of assets to lower the amount of seeking required.

My colleague wrote a system that took about 8 hours overnight (running on a grid) to compute a best attempt at some kind of optimized packing. It did work though!

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#16

Post by kozak » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:14 AM UTC

Old console games are great examples of how creativity benefits from constraints.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#17

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:17 AM UTC

codesushi42 wrote: post #11

pjmlp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not so sure about this. Most mobile games are developed with Unity. And what appear to be the cutting edge titles are usually using the Unreal engine. There's not much "to the metal" coding going on. Besides, most mobile games are being played by the casual crowd. Games don't need graphics that push hardware limits to sell.

> Most mobile games are developed with Unity. And what appear to be the cutting edge titles are usually using the Unreal engine.

Any source by mobile OS that you can point to?

I am quite sure there are other contenders like home grown engines, LibGDX, Marmalade, Cocos (all variants), SDL, MonoGame, DirectXTK, Project Anarchy , Apple own Scenekit and SpriteKit,...

> Besides, most mobile games are being played by the casual crowd. Games don't need graphics that push hardware limits to sell.

Why do you think then all major OS vendors are teaching the devs how to reduce their packages sizes? I can happily post the links of such presentations, just need to hunt them down again.

Game logic + Assets + Engine

Something got to give if one is required to push the size down.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#18

Post by kozak » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:21 AM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #7

kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty 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, b…

Can you suggest some explanation of the lambda feature in byte code?

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#19

Post by fra » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:30 AM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty 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…

Some day I will write a blog post about the tricks we have to pull off to fit all code & assets - or get animations running at 30FPS - on Pebble.

Trust me when I say this: low level development is alive and well at hardware companies.

Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1

#20

Post by Qantourisc » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:31 AM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #3

Pretty 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 amount of unoptimized crap they generate in a few weeks (in some cases) is quite depressive too I'm afraid. Game developers are wasting more and more CPU cycles, this of course reduces development cost. But it would be nice if they put some effort in making things run fast. And this doesn't only count for games!