I am waiting for Mr. Baggett book on the Lisp internals of Crash Bandicoot.
I don't care about the game, I never liked it, but the Lisp code of this man should be on par with PG's.
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
#22Pretty 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!
Making things fast is more important than making them run fast. And it's not about the cost — it's about iterations for the sake of game design.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#23confirmed: I'm a shitty developer
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
> 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,...
It doesn't matter how many frameworks are out there. If you hang around the game dev scene long enough, you'll see that most small devs are using Unity, and if not that, Cocos2DX. Just head over to Gamasutra, /r/gamedev, or browse Steam & itch.io and see the # of cross platform mobile ports. Talk to devs, they are using Unity.
> Why do you think then all major OS vendors are teaching the devs how to reduce their packages sizes?
Reducing package size isn't really comparable to writing portions of your game in assembler. I don't consider that low level coding or pushing hardware limits.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#25Resources blowing the memory was a common problem on the PS1. A common trick was to bake the resources into the exe. I worked on a game where the final disc was a directory of 25 exe's. Each exe was a level, even the front end was a separate exe. You could see that the size of each file was under 2mb, so you knew it would work. You would never/hardly ever dynamically allocate memory on the PS1.
There was a lot of duplication, but the CD was a huge resource and memory was thin on the ground. Also meant that we could use the CD for audio during the game.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#26Time + Internet = A smaller world that doesn't forget
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#27Sounds 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! :)
You're welcome. :-)
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#28Dave 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.
Take a look at http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/03/making-crash-ban... as mentioned above :)
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#29Pretty 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…
That's not really the same though. You are not really limited by RAM in most cases, also you are not limited by slow storage media like CD/DVDs as it was/is with most of the consoles.
The reality is, hardly anyone on mobile writes their own engines (a part from some of the big players) because it's just too much of an investment and Unity (or one of the other popular engines) is well optimized and allows much faster development.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#30Pretty 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.
Why wait?
Blog posts serve as great marketing these days, from showing off your engineering team's technical prowess, to recruiting others who hope to participate in some really advanced problem solving.
The press also helps maintain your existence in people's minds. With Google entering the market with Android Wear, and of course Apple's entry; a couple of 'this is how cool a Pebble watch is inside' would do well to not let us forget you exist!