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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

#101

Post by timboslice »

gambiting wrote: post #75
brianwawok wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there no standard? Like, if fps drops below 30 on a play through - red light and fix.

The problem is, that fps stays below 30 for 90% of the development cycle. Only in the last few months of a project everyone rips out useless code, debug code, debug overlays, loggers, extra network connections for statistic and performance servers,and finally you can produce a "nearly" final version of the game that doesn't have any debug code in - and only in that state you can see how it will run on actual hardware…

This is why we see all these Early Access games that run like garbage. They are still in the develop new features and fix bugs phase, and have not yet gotten to the optimization/strip out debug code phase.

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

#102

Post by dmbaggett »

riffraff wrote: post #97
Kenji wrote: post #79

(Incidentally, this problem—producing the ideal packing into fixed-sized pages of a set of arbitrarily-sized objects—is NP-complete, and therefore likely impossible to solve optimally in polynomial—i.e., reasonable—time.) Aren't there polytime algorithms that approximate to a certain percentage of the optimum?

yes[0], the author mentions "first fit" which presumably is "first fit decreasing" which is one of those. His approach was, from what I understand, to try a few approximate techniques and choose the best result without trying to run an exact algorithm with unbounded time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem#Analysis_o...

Exactly. You said it better than I. :)

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

#103

Post by pmlamotte »

timboslice wrote: post #98
adestefan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worse thing that ever happened to game development was the on-demand updates. There is nothing worse than buying a game on release day only to wait for it to download a patch.

I get the sentiment (they should have tested more thoroughly), but I for one appreciate the on-demand update mechanism. Would you rather play a game with previously unknown bugs, or have them smashed on launch day and get a patch to make your experience more stable?

I'd rather play a game that, if I should want to play it 20 years from now and there are no update servers - which I do still do with my old consoles - I can pop it in and not worry about bugs I have to figure out how to get patched. Games will inevitably have bugs, but developers have become too reliant on the update mechanisms and games have shipped completely busted.

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

#104

Post by Lawtonfogle »

adestefan wrote: post #90
i_are_smart wrote: post #52

> 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.

The worse thing that ever happened to game development was the on-demand updates. There is nothing worse than buying a game on release day only to wait for it to download a patch.

It is both good and bad. It allows delivery of critical fixes and new content, but it also decreases the demand for code quality from the start as well as increasing DLC. The bigger issue though is for the people who can't get it, like those whose only options for internet are dail up or satellite (with a 5GB per month limit). Sadly the market doesn't care about this small group enough to matter and we get left behind.

But, even with having a worse experience than a day 1 patch (that being unable to get the day 1 patch because it is 10GB and you only have 5GB for everything for a month), I wouldn't call it the worse thing ever to happen to game development.

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

#105

Post by kayoone »

userbinator wrote: post #71
kayoone wrote: post #32

Looks 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)

Following the same trend, the PS5 having 128GB of RAM seems a little ridiculous now, but consider that the PS4 was released in 2013, and the PS3 in 2006, so perhaps in 2020 it may really have that much.

Yeah i thought about that too. My PC already had 8GB of RAM in 2009 and even today that is still totally fine for most games. However, consoles usually share RAM between GPU and CPU though and high end PC GPUs today have up to 8GB of VRAM which will only increase once 4K content becomes more common place, so something like 64GB shared RAM for a supposed PS5 does not sound so outlandish as it may seem at first glance.

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

#106

Post by JabavuAdams »

joesmo wrote: post #89
JonnieCache wrote: post #2

If 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...

Nice read. I really like this part: "But we worried about the camera, dizziness, and the player’s ability to judge depth – more on that later." It's interesting that they were concerned with dizziness and the camera, concerns which seem to have unfortunately evaporated in most 3d games made since, to their detriment.

These concerns are back for VR. Also, remember that Crash Bandicoot was made at a time when devs weren't sure how mouse-look should work.

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

#107

Post by maccard »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #99
M4v3R wrote: post #34

> Ultimately Crash fit into the PS1's memory with 4 bytes to spare. Yes, 4 bytes out of 2097152. Good times Wow. Just wow. One can only imagine the amount of hard work and sweat that was put into making this possible. And the pride of developers when it actually worked and the game has become a success. Great story.

The story of how Mew (Pokemon) came to be is also pretty interesting. From memory: when they were getting close to shipping, they had a completely full cart (only one or two bytes to spare). They removed all of the debugging stuff, which freed up enough space for a new Pokemon to be defined. A programmer secretly added Mew right before they shipped, and Nintendo didn't find out until a couple of weeks later.

Yep - http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/iwata/iwata_asks_-_...

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

#109

Post by romaniv »

timboslice wrote: post #98
adestefan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worse thing that ever happened to game development was the on-demand updates. There is nothing worse than buying a game on release day only to wait for it to download a patch.

I get the sentiment (they should have tested more thoroughly), but I for one appreciate the on-demand update mechanism. Would you rather play a game with previously unknown bugs, or have them smashed on launch day and get a patch to make your experience more stable?

Games were stable enough before. And the stability of an average game in the first few month definitely went down with the introduction of on-demand online updates. Not only that, it's not entirely uncommon to see half-gigabyte patches.

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

#110

Post by joesmo »

kedean wrote: post #93
joesmo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice read. I really like this part: "But we worried about the camera, dizziness, and the player’s ability to judge depth – more on that later." It's interesting that they were concerned with dizziness and the camera, concerns which seem to have unfortunately evaporated in most 3d games made since, to their detriment.

ND still seems to be concerned with it. I did not personally play The Last Of Us, but it's cinematic nature (I did watch a movie recut) makes me feel like they put a lot of work into those aspects.

Actually, "The Last of Us" is a pretty bad offender as far as camera and motion sickness go. For first person games, there's probably no solution, but third person games like "The Last of Us" could use some camera management that would eliminate or greatly reduce motion sickness. It doesn't. It's all manual and needs readjusting constantly. Which is better than the camera rotating constantly, but only slightly as the end effect while playing is almost the same.

EDIT: Crash Bandicoot on the other hand managed the camera extremely well without creating any motion sickness.

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