very good read.
How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
61–70 of 254 posts
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#62Pretty 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…
We also have pretty amazing hardware today that is surprisingly underused most of the time. I've seen many Unity projects with the worst code you could imagine still run close to 60 FPS when shipped. Having an easy entry point means you're also going to get a lot of mediocre programmers using it. They seem productive in the first few weeks of the project but then quickly slow down halt once they start changing the de…
> I've seen many Unity projects with the worst code you could imagine still run close to 60 FPS when shipped.
On the other hand, a lot of the worst Unity dreck is horribly unoptimized and runs incredibly poorly, despite graphical simplicity and no real visual effects. If you tool around on Steam or YouTube you can find tons of examples - look up, for instance, Jim Sterling's "Squirty Play" series. Not every bad game on there has issues, but many do.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRceUcRZcK0zAt8sV33Z...
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work as a programmer in games industry,and I feel like the problem is made worse by artists and level designers who add more stuff without worrying about performance. I can make a super efficient physics system or model loader,but that only means that someone somewhere is going to add more particle effects or lights or whatever, or maybe placing too many props in the scene so PS4/X1 can't handle it. In fact, the se…
I am not a game developer, just a developer and a gamer, so please forgive what may be a goofy question: have you seen or engineered systems that capped the level designers' resources? For a super simplified example, I think of Forge in the Halo series, and I'm pretty sure Forge had a certain amount of monopoly money that gamer-designers ran out of eventually. Would such systems be infeasible more for political reaso…
The resources are usually capped in a "soft" way. So if the scene uses too much RAM for a console to handle, it will trigger a chain of emails that is sent to everyone involved, and well.....either I will be given a new task to somehow fit all of it in memory as a programmer,or a designer will be given a task to remove some stuff to go below limit. But framerate can be really tricky to handle,because ultimately, it's not up to me whatever fps drops are acceptable or not.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#64Looks like the system RAM on playstations increased by the factor of 2ˆ4 / 16x with every generation. 2MB to 32MB (PS2) to 512MB (PS3) to 8GB (PS4)
Imagine the uproar among developers when the 360 was going to have 256MB (from the Xbox's 64MB). http://www.1up.com/news/epic-games-cost-microsoft-billion
Unfortunately, I can't find a reference (probably in a video), but I heard that Bethesda Softworks had a party when Microsoft announced that the 360 would have 512MB RAM.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#65> and this had to be paged in and out dynamically, without any "hitches"—loading lags where the frame rate would drop below 30 Hz. This is what gets me. Modern game development seems to say "eh, a little hitching won't hurt anyone", and then we wind up with games that run like shit. Even on consoles.
I was playing recently Axiom Verge... Great game, except it has NES graphics and stutters like hell. Wasteland 2 on my machine also ran really, really badly, it was unplayable (it was the first time I got pissed for kickstarting something). Kerbal Space program also has some performance issues, but not bad as the previous two. Then I go play some graphics heavy game made by some studio that like to make good tech, or…
Two of those games use the Unity engine, and Axiom Verge apparently uses MonoGame.
Garbage collection is often a big problem for real-time performance, especially on the old version of Mono that Unity has.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#66I 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.
That would have to be Andy. I'm really kind of a hack when it comes to lisp programming. :)
But yes, Andy's lisp code is certainly great -- all the more so because he also wrote the lisp compilers that compiled it. :)
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine the uproar among developers when the 360 was going to have 256MB (from the Xbox's 64MB). http://www.1up.com/news/epic-games-cost-microsoft-billion
Unfortunately, I can't find a reference (probably in a video), but I heard that Bethesda Softworks had a party when Microsoft announced that the 360 would have 512MB RAM.
I suspect such a party was figurative.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's the same. All iOS devices except the iPad Air 2 have less than 2GB RAM (most 512 MB). Android 1-4 devices have often less than 1GB RAM. It's common that only 1-3 apps can stay in RAM depending on the platform and the apps memory usage (foreground apps, not background services). Applications/games in the Win95/PS1/N64 era were coded a lot more efficient. Back than, a common Win95a PC had 4-8MB RAM, (highend was 3…
I actually worked on a game that was running on the iPad2 (some gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaq0Sfp3_5Q ) and while you had to optimize quite a bit to achieve a certain number of drawcalls and memory usage it was still developed in Unity and far from what devs did in the ps1/2 era.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#69Crash Bandicoot was quite a technical feat, but also (perhaps less talked about) - a marketing feat. The series went to sell ~50 million copies IIRC and was also the best selling Playstation game of all time.
Games that are well engineered tend to be good games for some reason :-)
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#70Dave 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.
Thanks!
It's on my bucket list to write that book -- also including many humorous tales from my 10+ years at ITA Software, and anecdotes from my current startup (http://inky.com).
If I live long enough, that is. :)