Great post! Unfortunately it's on quora
How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
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Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#92Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#93If you haven't read the "Making Crash Bandicoot" blogposts, you're in for a treat. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
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.
ND still seems to be concerned with it. I did not personally play The Last Of Us, but it's cinematic nature (I did watch a movie recut) makes me feel like they put a lot of work into those aspects.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#94Great post! Unfortunately it's on quora
I don't mean this sarcastically but what's wrong with quora? I've always found it to have pretty good content but your comment seems to be implying it's assumed to be a bad place to read things. Why?
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#95If you haven't read the "Making Crash Bandicoot" blogposts, you're in for a treat. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
If Crash Bandicoot was so hard to squeeze in 2MB, I imagine other guys like Solid Snake (can't remember its name) would be incredibly hard.
Metal Gear Solid
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#96If you haven't read the "Making Crash Bandicoot" blogposts, you're in for a treat. http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
You're right about being in for a treat. Thanks for the link.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#97(Incidentally, this problem—producing the ideal packing into fixed-sized pages of a set of arbitrarily-sized objects—is NP-complete, and therefore likely impossible to solve optimally in polynomial—i.e., reasonable—time.) Aren't there polytime algorithms that approximate to a certain percentage of the optimum?
yes[0], the author mentions "first fit" which presumably is "first fit decreasing" which is one of those.
His approach was, from what I understand, to try a few approximate techniques and choose the best result without trying to run an exact algorithm with unbounded time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem#Analysis_o...
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#98> 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.
The worse thing that ever happened to game development was the on-demand updates. There is nothing worse than buying a game on release day only to wait for it to download a patch.
I get the sentiment (they should have tested more thoroughly), but I for one appreciate the on-demand update mechanism. Would you rather play a game with previously unknown bugs, or have them smashed on launch day and get a patch to make your experience more stable?
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#99> Ultimately Crash fit into the PS1's memory with 4 bytes to spare. Yes, 4 bytes out of 2097152. Good times Wow. Just wow. One can only imagine the amount of hard work and sweat that was put into making this possible. And the pride of developers when it actually worked and the game has become a success. Great story.
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.
Re: How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1
#100(Incidentally, this problem—producing the ideal packing into fixed-sized pages of a set of arbitrarily-sized objects—is NP-complete, and therefore likely impossible to solve optimally in polynomial—i.e., reasonable—time.) Aren't there polytime algorithms that approximate to a certain percentage of the optimum?
Yes, but approximate algorithms for NP-hard problems hadn't been as thoroughly studied back then -- this was 1996, after all -- and even if I'd had the appropriate papers at hand, I probably wouldn't have invested the effort to implement anything complicated. There was just simply too much to do in too little time. The simple approximation using greedy packing did pretty well in practice; I'm sure how close that comes to optimal is well understood by now.