I wonder if anyone controls the physical layout of bytes on the disk, at least for things like installing large software packages on an HDD, or a major release of an operating system on a DVD. It doesn't look likely: every time I install Ubuntu, I feel the process could be made much faster.
How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
51–60 of 254 posts
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#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.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#53> 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 play emulated Wii or PS2 games, and there are no issues and games look awesome.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#54I wonder if anyone controls the physical layout of bytes on the disk, at least for things like installing large software packages on an HDD, or a major release of an operating system on a DVD. It doesn't look likely: every time I install Ubuntu, I feel the process could be made much faster.
We do for PS4 disc images. Basically you want to lay out the data on the disc in such a way that the game can still be played while the system copies everything to the HDD. There are pages upon pages of manuals in PS4 SDK how to do it efficiently.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#55Pretty 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 design and end up with massive overtime hours while trying to debug and optimize the resulting mess.
Its made even worse with managers trying pseudo-agile-learned-in-a-two-day-masterclass adding even more procedures and overhead.
So yeah, you can make games today with less development talent than yesterday, it's still going to cost you more than having skilled software engineers and the resulting product will be a fraction of its potential.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#56I wonder if anyone controls the physical layout of bytes on the disk, at least for things like installing large software packages on an HDD, or a major release of an operating system on a DVD. It doesn't look likely: every time I install Ubuntu, I feel the process could be made much faster.
At least for Windows there's now a way to install the OS so that it only occupies one continuous large filesystem image with the compressed install files, and only stores the changes to this frozen filesystem images in the "traditional" way. It's called "wimboot".
http://labalec.fr/erwan/?p=1078
That way installing the OS mainy consists of copying this huge image file, hence the "physical layout of bytes on the disk" will mostly be fixed.
I'd guess that this could also be replicated in Linux, but personally I don't know if this is being done. I usually "debootstrap" or "pacstrap" my installs from a bootable USB stick :-).
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#57> 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 separation is huge nowadays - I know our engine inside out, but I personally wouldn't really know how to use the editor to remove things from the scene. Likewise, a level designer will know how to put props in the scene,but they will have no idea how underlying things are wired together or what is the performance cost of doing them.
It's a complicated problem, which might have been made worse by the fact that games are simply easier to make nowadays than ever before.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#58> 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.
With internet based games I wonder if that loading screen/hitch is essentially finding you a server as you move from one zone to another if the server you were on was too crowded.
I also wonder if they are doing the equivalent in modern consoles - pushing the limits with graphics, etc. where you simply can't avoid the hitch.
It would be good to hear someone's perspective on this that works on these types of games.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#59I wonder if anyone controls the physical layout of bytes on the disk, at least for things like installing large software packages on an HDD, or a major release of an operating system on a DVD. It doesn't look likely: every time I install Ubuntu, I feel the process could be made much faster.
Ubuntu targets a LOT of different hardware, it would be much harder to optimize the layout on their ISO image than it is to optimize for a fixed hardware platform like consoles.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#60> 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…
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 reasons than technical?