Does Any Forums enjoy reading about the inner workings of older video games? Reading about the optimizations they needed to do in order to work make the games work makes it feel closer to reading how a magic trick is performed, especially when it comes to graphics when you can easily see how they made it work afterwards.
For example, how maps were stored in the original Pokemon games, allowing them to store a town map in 90 bytes:
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>Does Any Forums enjoy reading
No.
>Does Any Forums enjoy
No.
>Does Any Forums
No.
i like reading how the missingno trick worked down to how the game stores and accesses memory blocks and how fighting specific trainers makes specific pokemon spawn instead of missingno
it let me complete my pokedex on my 20 year old gameboy in my closet
Thank G-d we don't need to this shit nowadays.
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The glitches that came up in old games as a result of memory limitations and no safeguards in the code would end up being kino. FF6 is a good example. You can legitimately get General Leo through enough fucking around.
>Does
No.
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The whole retrospective interview on how they got Crash Bandicoot working so well was quite fascinating. They managed to have quite large levels by basically inventing level streaming years before open-world games (eg. GTA III) would capitalize on it.
I haven't looked into it in too much depth but what I've seen has generally been fascinating. Demoscene is amazing too.
nah crash bandicoot was lame, just have the level come towards you and be restricted to x axis bros. Starfox did that in the super nintendo days.
What the fuck were those round things anyway?
Were they boulders? Pillars? Cut trees?
whether you like the game or not, the technology behind the level streaming was quite creative for a the time
the level of detail in environments it allowed was second to none back in the day, it was so impressive looking that sony used it to show off the playstation in events rather than their own software
another amazing point that rarely is mentioned is the fact the game runs at 512x240, not the usual 320x240
it also absolutely hammered the cd-rom hardware and killed many early playstations as well with their cheap plastic mechanisms
the best way to play crash is with your playstation upside down
If I was in charge of the world I would make you idiots either quit game devving or force you into learning optimization properly. UE5 and Unity makes me sick.
They were just working with what they had at the time and they weren't always necessarily great at it. Some guy optimized Mario 64 and was able to get 60FPS on original hardware
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>yeah, waste your time, your most valuable asset, making highly-optmized games, don't make the computer do the work for you
that's just extremely basic compression
yes? optimizing code is interesting, the bing bing wahoo-s are a byproduct
love this video
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Here's another one that impresses the fuck out of me. An entire game in less than most peoples "Hello World" programs
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If you waste your time you waste one person's time. If you don't optimize, you're wasting an unbounded number of people's time. How many lifetimes are wasted each year because someone didn't want to waste a week of theirs?