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

Post by talmand » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 2:14 PM UTC

JabavuAdams wrote: post #106

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.

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.

Post by zelos » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 2:15 PM 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…

Post by ddevault » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

Navarr wrote: post #112

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like a rumor. Mew already existed in the storyline unless that programmer then added the entire Mew storyline (inc. Mewtwo) - otherwise there was no reason for Mewtwo to exist

Post by talmand » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #57

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.

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…

Post by kayoone » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #50

codesushi42 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except unlike smartphones, the PS1/N64 did not support VM or even had any storage to page to. So no, it's not the same.

iOS documentation: "Instead, if the amount of free memory drops below a certain threshold, the system asks the running applications to free up memory voluntarily to make room for new data. Applications that fail to free up enough memory are terminated."