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Then vs Now (startrek.website)
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[-] MudMan@kbin.social 161 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.

I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.

Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.

Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.

Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.

[-] CodexArcanum@lemmy.world 59 points 9 months ago

There's some nostalgia goggles for sure.

I mean, the demo for Rollercoaster Tycoon (Mr. "Hand coded in assembly" there) bricked our Windows 98 machine when i installed it as a kid. My dad was pissed: we had to reformat the harddrive, reinstall windows, all that.

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 20 points 9 months ago

Seems like a golden era of running everything in ring 0, although that wasn't called like this then, afaik

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[-] Ellvix@lemmy.world 31 points 9 months ago

Yeah I remember the specific clock speed thing! I had a game that I loved on a friend's computer and didn't get to play it much. Some sort of space sim / combat game. Years later I had my own much more powerful machine and was hyped to check it out. Installed via dosbox or whatever, loaded it up, and it ran at fucking 10x speed! It took seconds to walk around a city and the combat was completely unplayable. So sad but also pretty funny. No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware. If you want an easier game, just get a worse computer apparently.

[-] groet@feddit.de 43 points 9 months ago

No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware.

It's the most trivial and straight forward thing to do. The game is a simple loop of:

  • get user input (can be nothing)
  • calculate new game state based on old state and input
  • draw new game state.

The speed of the game is now 100% dependant on the speed of computation. NOT attaching fps to hardware is the hard thing, as you need to detach the game state loop and the drawing loop and then synchronize them. Doing that yourself is extremely complicated. Today developers don't even need to think about that because the whole drawing loop is abstracted away by things like directX/Vulcan and the game engine. But without those tools, fps tied to CPU speed is basically the default.

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[-] massive_bereavement@kbin.social 21 points 9 months ago

Ecco the dolphin was made specifically hard to ensure people couldn't beat it on rental during a weekend.

[-] MudMan@kbin.social 13 points 9 months ago

Right. That was common, too. Games were tiny and very expensive, so broken balance was often used to pad out length. And yeah, it got crazy once Americans started popularizing rental and publishers got desperate to make the games less economical to beat without purchasing them.

I did finish Ecco 1 legit, though. Once.

I've tried the last couple of stages a few times. I still don't understand how tween me managed that. Even on a CRT with original hardware and zero lag that's a stupid thing to try to do.

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[-] Wilzax@lemmy.world 99 points 9 months ago

"Then" is just indie today.

[-] RandomStickman@kbin.social 31 points 9 months ago

That and it easily running on Linux, either naively or though Proton, is why I haven't touched any AAA in like... at least 5 years? Maybe closer to 10.

[-] ZILtoid1991@kbin.social 14 points 9 months ago

A lot of today's indie devs are also... well...

groomerwojak.jpg: "I groomed a teen fan of mine, and when she came forward I made her to write an apology, also I spent my Patreon money on a sexdoll, and my code is spaghetti."

"We barely managed to make a functioning game with premade assets, and our popularity was so dependent on Pokémon not performing well, our fanbase is a toxic cesspool as a result, who can't express the love to the game without actively dissing Nintendo."

"I'm a bigoted con artist who rebrands every time they get busted for his crappy horror game."

"Optimization? We are already using low-poly assets!"

"The assets in our pixelart games are very unaligned, and we use high-resolution fonts because no one makes bitmap fonts anymore."

[-] SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works 12 points 9 months ago

Nothing wrong with spending Patreon money on a sexdoll.

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[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 83 points 9 months ago

Games back then : created by 1 to 4 people with autism because they wanted to have fun on a computer

Games now : driven by dickheads that just left business school at the whims of billionaire conglomoration funds.

[-] mossy_@lemmy.world 27 points 9 months ago

I miss when games used to be good. Anyone 'member Vampire Survivors, Lethal Company, Bug Fables? Developers these days just can't compare.

[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
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[-] mathematicalMagpie@lemm.ee 72 points 9 months ago

To be fair, game devs did the hackiest shit to deal with the constraints of the time. They did things that no programmer would do today because they're bad practices when you're not worried about tiny amounts of RAM or storage.

[-] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 31 points 9 months ago

I love watching videos about old game systems programming. The gymnastics you had to do to code, like, super Mario, just to show more than 3 colors is really interesting.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 19 points 9 months ago

People who think modern coding practices are bloated should study why certain speed running mechanics work. A lot of them stem from things we would never do today. We've removed entire classes of bugs by using "bloated" languages and tools.

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[-] beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 60 points 9 months ago

Problems with game developers might better be understood as problems with capitalism, to paraphrase Ted Chiang

[-] beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 33 points 9 months ago

We can’t update games or refactor code to make it smaller bc our bosses demand we constantly work harder, better, faster, stronger. They force us into games that require more expensive hardware bc the entire tech industry depends on people upgrading every other year. And it’s online constantly bc we hoover up player data for our new profit centre where we sell all your data.

And now they made a meme that deflects blame off them and onto devs, who have way more contact w the public than anonymous rich people

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[-] Daxtron2@startrek.website 52 points 9 months ago

So we're just gonna conveniently forget all the shovelware from that time period?

[-] Twinklebreeze@lemmy.world 37 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yes. Because older is always better. Then when the present is the before times people will look back fondly on it too.

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[-] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 24 points 9 months ago

Yeah, heavy survivorship bias in this one.

[-] twinnie@feddit.uk 13 points 9 months ago

Everyone seems to think that games like Doom and Half-Life came out all the time. I remember looking at shareware disks in shops and seeing loads of games that looked like total crap.

[-] bazus1@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago

For sure! just go to Abandonware and try to go to a specific year to find something. You have to wade through pages of garbo to find something worth playing.

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[-] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 45 points 9 months ago

I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.

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[-] hdnsmbt@lemmy.world 45 points 9 months ago

You realize it's not devs that make those decisions, right? It's publishers and execs. You know, the guys who make the actual money in all this. Stop blaming devs for stupid exec decisions.

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[-] RealFknNito@lemmy.world 44 points 9 months ago

"WHY ARE YOU PIRATING OUR GAMES???"

[-] RIP_Cheems@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago

BECAUSE IF BUYING ISNT OWNING THE PIRATING ISNT STEALING.

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[-] doublejay1999@lemmy.world 39 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Not just games . I download one of the trendy note pad apps. It’s 500mb.

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[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Very rose tinted glasses. I remember horrifying cache corruption bugs that locked you out of certain game areas permanently on that save, random illegal operation exceptions crashing games (no autosave btw), the whole system regularly freezing and needing to be completely restarted, games just inexplicably not working to begin with on a regular basis because of some hardware incompatibility and the internet sucked for finding fixes then and patches weren't a thing so you were just screwed.

I would say that games not all being written in C and assembly trying to squeeze out every possible performance efficiency with nothing but dev machismo as safeguards is in fact a good thing.

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[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 37 points 9 months ago

For those that are unaware, the second chad is most likely referring to .kkrieger. Not a full game, but a demo (from a demoscene) whose purpose was to make a fully playable game with a max size of 96kb. Even going very slow, you won't need more than 5 minutes to finish it.

The startup is very CPU heavy and takes a while, even on modern systems, because it generates all the geometry, textures, lighting and whatnot from stored procedures.

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[-] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 36 points 9 months ago

What a horrible take. Game devs were so bad at one point in the past they almost killed the entire market. Classic survivorship bias here.

[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 14 points 9 months ago

That's because the business assholes flooded the market with shitty games that cost $120 (adjusted for inflation) that looked like this :

https://i.imgur.com/yQAWeYw.jpeg

Not the game dev's fault, it's the business asshole's fault, just like the image.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q

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[-] Toneswirly@lemmy.world 26 points 9 months ago

Fuck the haters. 80s game devs were creating beauty out of nothing.

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[-] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 25 points 9 months ago

I see stuff like this and I don't blame developers/coders for all the shit that's happening. If you objectively look at gameplay and such, most games are actually pretty decent on their own. The graphics are usually really nice and the story is adequate, if not quite good, the controls are sensible and responsive...

A lot of the major complaints about modern games isn't necessarily what the devs are making, it's more about what the garbage company demands is done as part of the whole thing. Online only single player is entirely about control, keeping you from pirating the game (or at least trying to) plus supplying on you and serving you ads and such... Bad releases are because stuff gets pushed out the door before it's ready because the company needs more numbers for their profit reports, so things that haven't been given enough time and need more work get pushed onto paying customers. Day one patches are normal because between the time they seed the game to distributors like valve and Microsoft and stuff, and the time the game unlocks for launch day, stuff is still being actively worked on and fixed.

The large game studios have turned the whole thing into a meat grinder to just pump money out of their customers as much as possible and as often as possible, and they've basically ruined a lot of the simple expectations for game releases, like having a game that works and that performs adequately and doesn't crash or need huge extras (like updates) to work on day 1....

Developers themselves aren't the problem. Studios are the problem and they keep consolidating into a horrible mass of consumer hostile policies.

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[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 22 points 9 months ago

"The inverse square root function in the C math library isn't fast enough. That's okay, I'll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster."

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[-] SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works 21 points 9 months ago

...Is the breast milk thing inspired by reality? Wait, I don't know if I really want to know.

[-] johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world 18 points 9 months ago

DAE games bad now??

[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 16 points 9 months ago

it's not devs fault, is the company

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[-] WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.works 15 points 9 months ago

This is so true. Also let's not forget where game is almost unplayable and constantly crashing on release.

[-] mavu@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I hate this conflation of "Developer" with every other role in modern game development.

If you think the new Porsche looks shit, do you blame the Mecanical engineer who designed the brake mechanism?

If your new manga body pillow gives you a rash, do you blame the graphic designer of the manga?

There is not a single thing listed in the meme above that is actually the fault of the actual developers working on the game. Don't even need to talk about the first picture.

game size is studio management related. They want to stuff as much (repetitive, boring) content into the game as possible. Plus a multiplayer mode no one asked for.

Optimizations don't happen because the CEO decides to take the sales money of the game this quarter, and not next, and ships an unfinished product.

Always online is ALWAYS a management decision.

It's a shit joke, it's wrong because it blames the wrong people, and its also just dumb.

[-] leaky_shower_thought@feddit.nl 14 points 9 months ago

those always online "single-player" games aren't what you think.

your ads and tracking friends are always interested in playing with you.

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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
1350 points (95.0% liked)

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