The music and atmosphere was gorgeous. Fond memories of wasted youth
I never finished the game, sadly.
The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
131–140 of 199 posts
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but this doesn't prevent you from being mindful and selecting the right tools with smaller memory footprint while providing the features you need. Go's "GC disadvantage" is turned on its head by developing "Zero Allocation" libraries which run blazingly fast with fixed memory footprints. Similarly, rolling your own high performance/efficient code where it matters can save tremendous amounts of memory where it ma…
> Go's "GC disadvantage" is turned on its head by developing "Zero Allocation" libraries which run blazingly fast with fixed memory footprints. Similarly, rolling your own high performance/efficient code where it matters can save tremendous amounts of memory where it matters. The savings there would be negligible (in modern terms) but the development cost would be significantly increased. > Of course more features an…
> The savings there would be negligible (in modern terms)
A word of praise for Go: it is pretty performant, while using very little memory. I inherited a few Django apps, and each thread just grows to 1GB. Running something like celery quickly eats up all memory and start thrashing. My Go replacements idle at around 20MB, and are a lot faster. It really works.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#133It really puts into perspective how different the constraints were
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#134I was looking at a production service we run that was using a few GBs of memory. When I add up all the actual data needed in a naive compact representation I end up with a few MBs. So much waste. That's before thinking of clever ways to compress, or de-duplicate or rearrange that data. Back in the day getting the 16KB expansion pack for my 1KB RAM ZX81 was a big deal. And I also wrote code for PIC microcontrollers th…
I think you're right about the waste, but I'm not sure it's entirely "accidental"... a lot of it is traded for different kinds of efficiency
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#135Apparently this person is referring to the available ram on a Commodore 64. The media (data) on disk or tape was much more than that.
But that's also kind of what makes it impressive in a different way. Even if the game was larger on disk/tape, they still had to stream it in tiny chunks and make it run within those constraints
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
That website seems to be gone now, unless it’s supposed to redirect to a sketchy German wix ad…
The website is there as of this comment. Yes there's a wix ad, but it seems normal (it just points to a wix sign up page) and not sketchy to me.
It's redirecting to homeputerium.de and seems to have nothing to do with what they're referring to.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#137> ... 40 kilobytes.
How times have changed. My best-selling program "Apple Writer", for the Apple II, ran in eight kilobytes. It was written entirely in 6502 assembly language.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The website is there as of this comment. Yes there's a wix ad, but it seems normal (it just points to a wix sign up page) and not sketchy to me.
It's redirecting to homeputerium.de and seems to have nothing to do with what they're referring to.
Yall can't spend more than 5 seconds looking at the UI before giving up?
One of the only UI components on the homepage is a list of years you can click to see the entries.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of them generates tons (up to tens of gigabytes or more) of data during runtime, but they all output it, and don't store them on disk or RAM. They are highly dynamic programs, and not very different from game engines on that regard. > misleadingly minimalistic. That's the magic of these programs or demoscene in general. No misleading. That's the goal.
I’m on my phone so cannot run it, but you cannot generate data and not store it somewhere. It’s going to consume either system resources (RAM/storage) or video resources (VRAM). If your point is that it uses gigabytes of VRAM instead of system memory, then I think that is an extremely weak argument for how modern software doesn’t need much memory because all you’re doing is shifting that cost from one stack of silico…
All demos I have shared with you are designed to run on resource constrained systems. Using all the resources available on the system is a big no no from the start.
Instead, as you guessed, these demos generate assets on the fly and stream to the respective devices. You cite inefficiencies. I tell they run at more than 60 FPS on these constrained systems. Remember, these are early 2000s systems. They are not that powerful by today’s standards, yet these small binaries use these systems efficiently and generate real time rendered CG on the fly.
Nothing about them is inefficient or poor. Instead they are marvels.
Re: The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes
#140I was comparing games prices last week and I found that prices from the 80s aren't too different from modern game prices. Elite was £20 in 1984 and that would be £66 today, which is not very different from what a good game for the PS5 costs today. Except that games then were made by one or two people and nowadays games are made by teams with coders, musicians, artists, etc.
Yeah, the games industry is in a pretty big crisis right now, and I think change needs to happen both ways:
Consumers need to understand that keeping games at the same price for decades despite rising costs and inflation is not realistic. If they want the industry to thrive, they need to be ok with games being more expensive.
Meanwhile, developers need to stop making games so expensive. This is an entertainment industry / corpo problem, really. Companies have seen the big profits and decided that only the big profits will do, which means you need to make a big open world cinematic experience, which is expensive, and because it's expensive, they won't take risks on making anything actually interesting.
The only way gaming moves forward is if we make riskier games that cost less to produce, which is why indies are the ones making the good games these days.