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For those interested, the competitive AoE2 scene is alive and well with one of its biggest tournaments, NAC5, going on now, an in-person LAN in Berlin. https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Nili%27s_Apartment_Cup/5 https://www.twitch.tv/nili_aoe https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXeY7zz-1LsyZdnpFbffdqA
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NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY HAVE TAKEN FROM US. WE WERE ONCE A CULTURE. NOW WE ARE LOST, FOREVER. WHITHER OUR SENSE OF BEAUTY. (etc., etc., insert architecture pics to taste) C'mon dude. The opportunity for people to talk to one another about this stuff is unimaginably better than it was back then. Like, here we are, right now, me telling you you're full of shit. What are the chances of us being able to do that in 1999? (…
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But: if you're going to make the case for the internet making us worse off, "people used to communicate with one another... LOOK AT WHAT WE HAVE LOST" is the worst angle possible. Good lord. I just can't even comprehend it.
> A key speedup technique AoE used was realized during discussions I had with iD software programmer and optimization guru Michael Abrash over lunch at Tia's Mexican Restaurant in Mesquite, TX. How many freeform interactions like this did we lose because of the Internet's illusion of being connected?
NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY HAVE TAKEN FROM US. WE WERE ONCE A CULTURE. NOW WE ARE LOST, FOREVER. WHITHER OUR SENSE OF BEAUTY. (etc., etc., insert architecture pics to taste) C'mon dude. The opportunity for people to talk to one another about this stuff is unimaginably better than it was back then. Like, here we are, right now, me telling you you're full of shit. What are the chances of us being able to do that in 1999? (…
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You worked on the port of Metal Gear Solid?! OH MY GOD THIS IS SO COOL! Edit: Looking it up you might have worked on a larger amount of games than I thought. Very awesome nonetheless. https://www.mobygames.com/game/company:99/from:1998/platform...
Thanks!!! Yes it was MGS - the deal was with our studio to do the port from PSX -> PC and since Microsoft was the publisher, part of the deal was for Konami to port Age Of Empires (1? 2?) to PSX.
In any event, that game, and that port, were a part of my childhood that I will always remember.
I worked on port of a Konami game from PSX to PC, that was 1999-2000 - the code (C) had lots of #ifdefs like where inline assembly was placed, and the original "C" code was kept. It seemed all done by one specific programmer, and what really saved us (in porting) the game was the originallly kept "C" code. My mips knowledge was never as good as x86. So yes, it was the norm back then. My second job (1998), was working…
It was written in the same C / inline assembly style. Unfortunately seemed to me like the final ASM didn't quite do the same thing as the original C.
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I think AOE was using DirectX, so I assume that was one level up the stack, ie figuring out which sprites are visible to which extent by walking different data structures and then just throwing stuff at directdraw.
DirectDraw wasn't really meant as a drawing toolkit; you _did_ have blits, but they were not hardware accelerated AFAIK and not nearly flexible enough for what the article suggests (mirror, stiple, probably other stuff). In general, what DirectDraw gave you was a rectangle you could draw pixels into, and a way to get those pixels efficiently to the screen. In other words, more like a clean abstraction over the displa…
http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/directdraw%20results.htm
Even the oldest S3 VLB cards performed 8 bit copies 3-4x faster than CPU. Pretty much every VGA chipset from around 1993-94 onward had 2D accelerator, most popular were IBM 8514 derived like from S3 or ATI.