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Metroid Source Code Expanded

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Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#21

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #14
Kurtz79 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamedev is simpler today than it was by then, but games (we are talking about AAA titles, as Metroid was at the time) have escalated in complexity by several orders of magnitudes. Today is simply impossible for a single person/small team to create a rival to Call of Duty 4 or Fallout 3, while back then it was relatively simple for someone with the skills and talent to emerge.

Not as rivals to those games, perhaps. But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game.

I'd just like to point out that Minecraft's code is absolutely horrible from an algorithmic standpoint. On performance/speed and code quality metrics, Minecraft is a statistical fluke.

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#22

Post by extension »

mrcharles wrote: post #3

It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.

It would be hard to make Crysis in 8-bit assembly, but it's not especially hard to make an NES game in 8-bit assembly. In many ways, it is much easier than modern game development:

- There is no hardware abstraction layer. There is one hardware target, you know exactly how it works, and you can use/abuse it any way you like. And all the hardware is designed together for the sole purpose of making games.

- There is no I/O. All your code and data is just mapped into memory from a ROM pack. You have to swap memory banks in and out, but you can layout the banks explicitly. You typically do one level per bank and just swap banks to change levels.

- There is no memory management. RAM is all yours. You just layout your dynamic data explicitly, or let the assembler do it, or some combination of the two.

- There are no data types or undefined language behavior. Just n-bit registers and instructions. Need to use 12.4 fixed point math? Or pack a flag in the high bit of a pointer? No problem, just write some assembler macros.

Of course, in exchange for control, you have to give up some power. Maximum 16k of code, can only write to video memory between rescans, no divide instruction.. that kind of thing. But better the devil you know. It's a lot more fun solving "how can I do this with what I have?" than "what the hell is going on?"

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#23

Post by joezydeco »

trafficlight wrote: post #17
joezydeco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many arcade games were done entirely in assembly. Everything that came out of Williams/Midway for example (From Defender all the way to Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Crusin', basically everything not on PC-based hardware) were all completely done in assembly. Wrap your noggin around that one.

What were the development cycles for those later arcade games? How long did it take to build Mortal Kombat and how many people did they have working on it? I should've looked at Wikipedia first, it answered part of my question. "The first Mortal Kombat game was 4 guys, literally, one programmer, myself (Boon), two graphics guys (Tobias and Vogel), and a sound guy (Forden) was the entire team, literally"

In those days it took about a year, maybe a year and a half.

Many teams would carry a core "operating system" (really a library of system routines/process scheduler/IO/audits) from game to game and build off of that. That left more time to write the game mechanics and choreography.

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#24

Post by mrcharles »

Impossible wrote: post #18
mrcharles wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debugging I'm with you, but the actual time to create simple parts of the game? Going to have to disagree with your disagreement. It's like two lines of code nowadays to move a sprite around on screen and draw it, because you don't have to write your blit function yourself.

You didn't have to write blit functions yourself on the NES either, it had hardware (PPU) that would handle blitting of sprites for you. There were a lot of restrictions that you'd have to work around, but actually displaying something on screen didn't take that much code. This also indulges the fallacy that the hard part of game development is writing low level graphics routines. That can be difficult to learn but o…

Trust me, I've been doing this a long time, I'm not pushing out fallacies. But you had to do a hell of a lot more management in NES/SNES/Asm than a simple ->Draw() call.

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#25

Post by mithaler »

mrcharles wrote: post #3

It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.

Was this actually written in assembly by its original developers? I'm not familiar with the history--I get the sense the code explained here was originally disassembled from a ROM, and then systematically analyzed to gain an understanding of how it worked.[0] If so, couldn't it have been written in C or somesuch?

Not that that wouldn't make this presentation here an impressive feat.

[0] http://www.metroid-database.com/m1/sourcecode.php

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#26

Post by chwahoo »

slowpoke wrote: post #20
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as rivals to those games, perhaps. But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game.

> But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game. More so, they prove (again) that the technology arms race in today's video games is utterly retarded. It's also the reason many indie games tend to be so good and refreshing - they can't make a hitech ultra-HD game, so they focus on what really matters: gameplay and design.

"Utterly retarded" is far too strong a statement. The indie games of tomorrow may be built on "hitech ultra-HD" engines. The exploration of the space of games is advancing along many dimensions (including technology) and I think technology improvements will be needed for many of the great games to come.

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#27

Post by mrcharles »

extension wrote: post #22
mrcharles wrote: post #3

It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.

It would be hard to make Crysis in 8-bit assembly, but it's not especially hard to make an NES game in 8-bit assembly. In many ways, it is much easier than modern game development: - There is no hardware abstraction layer. There is one hardware target, you know exactly how it works, and you can use/abuse it any way you like. And all the hardware is designed together for the sole purpose of making games. - There is no…

Counters:

-You think you know how it works. But lots of little hardware quirks will still bite you in the ass.

-This means that all your data has to fit in your code space, so you either trim code or you trim data.

-Generally you wouldn't do dynamic data at all, ever, so instead you were stuck constantly balancing and tweaking constant arrays of data and balancing them against everything else in the world. Do I allow 3 entries for explosion effects? Or 5? Am I willing to have one less enemy on screen for those extra effects?

-There's also often very few registers and an extremely limited stack.

I mean, I'm not saying you are wrong, and from certain angles sure it's easier to write in 8 bit assembler vs modern day high level languages. But there's also things to consider that happen above the language. What happens when there's a bug in some code and you have to hand it to a programmer who isn't familiar with that code? What happens when two subroutines are too far away from each other to jump? What happens when you get graphic corruption bugs and don't have the modern conveniences of data breakpoints and other tools?

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#28

Post by mrcharles »

mithaler wrote: post #25
mrcharles wrote: post #3

It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.

Was this actually written in assembly by its original developers? I'm not familiar with the history--I get the sense the code explained here was originally disassembled from a ROM, and then systematically analyzed to gain an understanding of how it worked.[0] If so, couldn't it have been written in C or somesuch? Not that that wouldn't make this presentation here an impressive feat. [0] http://www.metroid-database.co…

The N64 was the first nintendo platform to support a C compiler out of the box.

I suppose it's possible that some crazy developer wrote their own C compiler back in the day, but if that ever happened I didn't hear about it. And I was trained by people who worked for Nintendo.

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#29

Post by jbrennan »

Osmose wrote: post #8
seagaia wrote: post #6

I'm guessing games built upon previous ones? I'm wondering to what extent they borrowed from previous prototypes/work. Also, I wonder what the total dev time for the game was.

Most definitely. There's another really good doc on Super Mario World that compares a lot of similar chunks of code to their counterparts in the Super Mario Bros. 3 code, which SMW was based off of.

Do you have a link to this? Sounds really interesting!

Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded

#30

Post by Goladus »

slowpoke wrote: post #20
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as rivals to those games, perhaps. But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game.

> But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game. More so, they prove (again) that the technology arms race in today's video games is utterly retarded. It's also the reason many indie games tend to be so good and refreshing - they can't make a hitech ultra-HD game, so they focus on what really matters: gameplay and design.

The technology race in video games is as utterly retarded as it is in the movie industry. There's as much room for Clerks and the Blair Witch Project as there is for Toy Story and Avatar.
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