/v/ - Video Games

This is a pretty good read on the state of gamedev in the late 90s. Crash and Spyro used everything to look good on such a constrained system.

>>14078016

Nigger the original Crash Bandicoot also had shitty framerates so I fail to see your point

>>14078016

>Back then the majority of dev time was spent fighting the asinine and limited hardware to get your game to work

>Now the issue is getting the ideologues to stop shitting up your project long enough to make it run well

I have to wonder which is worse, squeezing all the juice out of a raisin or keeping flies off your grapes?

>>14078140

Crash had shitty frames, Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps and a reduced resolution, the battles for FFVII ran at 15fps, etc. But don't let that ruin OP's nostalgia.

>>14078140

The point is he bought into the old games having something named 60hz means everything was at 60fps meme.

>>14078166

The former either has you come up with a solution or wait for technology to get better. The latter is going to be the death of civilization at the rate things are going.

>>14078353

>The latter is going to be the death of civilization at the rate things are going.

I'll take hyperbole for $800. It's an easy problem to solve, you just have to force the spineless cucks out of management and HR. Easy. Lot easier than trying to make an open world game with mid/late 90s computer hardware or a VR game with hardware from 2013.

>>14078016

They replaced the provided high level Sony libraries with their own low level code, wrote their own dialect of assembly LISP, used a cluster of Silicon Graphics machines to run a stochastic search algorithm which discovered the most efficient way to pack levels to keep streaming blocks of 10MB levels with under 2MB in memory at all times, and baked the render order, visibility and occlusion of every triangle at every position the camera would be in a level, and finally created a game that would conduct 120,000 disk read operations on a commodity CD drive rated for 70,000.

Before Crash shipped, they had trouble fitting all of the code in memory. After manually twiddling with changing the format of loops and reusing variables to get a slightly more compact binary, the final product was left with only 4 bytes out of 2097152 bytes of memory to spare.

AND THEN THEY TRANSLATED THE WHOLE FUCKING THING INTO JAPANESE AND ADDED INGAME TUTORIAL PROMPTS WITH HIRAGANA, KATAKANA AND KANJI TEXT

It's too bad modern devs are so fucking talentless. The true potential of modern hardware will never be reached.

>>14080301

>The true potential of modern hardware will never be reached.

And never will as long as consoles exist.

Thats triple for modern ones which are weak as shit and sold at a profit unlike before.

>>14080320

It'd be a little retarded to design games around being played on really badly overpriced "high end" cards.

>>14080349

I was about to say you're wrong, but you're actually kind of right. Things have gotten shittier ever since (((nvidia))) realized that can nickel and dime the retarded 12 year olds who suddenly love started to love PC gaymen a few years ago.

>>14078140

>Nigger the original Crash Bandicoot also had shitty framerates so I fail to see your point

Afaik it's stable 30fps all the way through with very minor exceptions

>>14080301

The profile of software developers for video games has shifted.

On average, developers (all sector) are at the same level they were 20 ago, or better.

However, today, there is a sustained high demand for top gun developers in extremely lucrative industry (finance, advertising, pharmaceutical, you name it). In opposition, the video game industry is notorious for it's shitty salaries, on top of borderline illegal work conditions. At least with high-tech startups you have something to bet on at the end of the crunch, which never happens in the video game industry.

The Carmack & co from the 90s would have been immediately poached today by big corporations or the prospect of venture fundings.

>>14078359

unions can make that a big problem, anon

of course, if Trump decides to make being in a union illegal, then that makes it a lot easier to get rid of them

>>14080495

The US is already among the countries where it's easier to fire someone. It's also the motherland of SJWs. If it didn't solve the problem before, it won't solve it now.

>>14080495

How many video game unions can you name?

>>14080636

>levels, 3D models, and animation.

Oh and textures, which is the most mind blowing part to me. Look at a game like Ridge Racer R4 and try to comprehend how Namco squeezed into the PS1's lowly hardware.

You can't

>>14080495

I've never heard of a game dev union nor a game dev union keeping someone who should get fired from being fired.

Only union I know of for vidya is the Voice Actors Guild. But those idiots fucked themselves over with their one year strike that gave a lot of non-union talent opportunity to get into the industry.

>>14078016

Make no mistake there's still plenty of technical magic going on with modern systems. But most of that falls onto the engine developers not the ones using it, and it's just as possible for them to ruin it, as with for example Drakengard 3 which manages to look and run like ass. Also, there was plenty of technical ineptitude on the older consoles. The exceptions are just that.

>>14080966

The thing is that those cunts are an off-shoot of the Screen Actor's Guild and even a few minutes looking into that particular shitshow should show the sort of stranglehold tactics they employ.l

>>14080433

>dumbed down sequel because devs wanted more money

>no sequal at all

>dumbed down sequel because sales weren't enough

>went to consoles because of piracy and most people couldn't even run their game

Interesting read.

>Large companies were just as inept as today

>That feminist marketer that almost killed Crash's chance

>>14081010

>>14080966

>getting fucking upitty when you have a talent that literally everyone can do

This is why hookers can't unionize

>>14078166

To be honest for final fantasy it kind of makes sense because those games are as non interactive as it gets, so it's nice to invest on graphix.

>>14081010

Not to mention most voice actors are absolute cunts who should be the ones being replaced by immigrants or machines, not hardworking fellows like counstruction workers, street sweepers and so on.

>>14082750

Also the way the musical composition was handled.

>"Step one, is the beat the level."

Version I had a link to with better audio quality has been apparently purged from jewtube.

>>14083044

GET ANGRY ROBO-REN

>>14083044

THIS. CANNOT. CONTINUE.

>>14083044

Graphics are expensive, and graphics are insane today. Everyone makes first assumptions on visuals despite many saying they don't, and game development costs rise naturally as a result. The only options are to either lower graphics which is a bad move in the modern AAA visuals race or just scale down the game and make the game shorter and smaller.

>>14083260

and if we look to propaganda the direction the industry seems to want o go is towards shorter and smaller. But if Nintendo's, Middle Market & Indie success is evidence of anything, is that the smarter option in terms of fun would be to focus on pleasant but non graphic intensive aesthetics. Although I speculate, AMD and Nvdia probably subsidize/collude with developers to push for new hardware.

>>14083044

No, allow it to continue. Let it die

>>14083260

How many times does that one budget comparison image have to be posted?

>>14083260

Nvidia can't even make new hardware thet pushes the old one out of the market without a little help from (((updates)))

>>14084608

Worse than that, Nvidia refuses to make new hardware that pushes the old out of the market because they're lazy, greedy assholes who don't wanna do shit until AMD has caught up with them. They've even said that they have another line of cards ready but don't see a point in releasing it when their stuff is still the best.

They're stiffing the growth of vidya graphics because they don't want to actually spend any money until AMD starts taking their business away.

>itt we pretend to understand computers

>>14080425

>Afaik it's stable 30fps all the way through with very minor exceptions

Crash 3 has entire levels which run sub 30

>>14084586

Good for that one game. Doesn't change the fact that 90% of early 3D games that people have nostalgia for in truth ran like shit.

>>14078181

I have never heard anyone mention this until this exact moment on 8/v/. If you wanna see shitty framerates accurately emulate golden eye and blow everything around you the fuck up. You'll quickly see the FPS drop from 14 to 0-4 very quickly and yes kids didn't care cause there wasn't anything better to make it obvious this was bad.

You basically imagined the fires and basked in the smoking aftermath.

>>14080293

it usually targeted 30fps but actually had input lag. less noticeable on original hardware and a CRT, but it is there. the PAL version actually runs a little better due to the way the game was programmed, making it a rare exception. This also minimized input lag.

many 3D games of the time targeted 30fps, some 20 (panzer dragoon, daytona USA, ocarina of time come to mind), and quite a few even lower (mostly N64 games like goldeneye or conker's bad fur day.)

there are some 60fps 3d games like omegaboost on the PS1 or f-zero X on the N64, but generally 60 was for 2D games. The dreamcast and PS2 ushered in some really great new things, the sheer power of the DC hardware made it possible to get 480p60 on consumer hardware with common desktop displays, and the PS2 had developers invent a new type of rendering called field based rendering which relied on the 480i video format but required games to run in 60fps. Any drops in performance weren't measured in framerate, but rather the speed of the game, where the game would visibly slow down as opposed to dropping frame data. Dropping frame data in those games would break the rendering as each frame had to be rendered correctly.

As consoles became more like PCs, they began to take on more of the shortcomings of PCs, but this was inevitable as the options available for developers at the time shrank and new technologies had to be embraced as they became widespread. Things like LCD flat panels and all the difficulties of getting the best image out of them.

>>14081010

To be frank, there are a lot of shitty voice actors out there, and it actually does take some practice to get at least semi-decent at it. Not to mention that if your voice is bad or if you have any problems in your throat and vocal chords you can kiss any chances of working as a voice actor goodbye. It's a 'simple' job, but it's not something just any average cunt can do.

>>14086213

The actors union heavily practices nepotism so your political leanings is more important then if your voice sounds good. The entire reason for the strike was an ill conceived attempt at forming a monopoly.

>>14085751

Such as?

>>14084590

This one >>14082664 , or the one with the likes of Dragon's Crown's budget and quality compared to various kikestarter games?

>>14078166

>But don't let that ruin OP's nostalgia.

It's not nostalgia, it's just pointing out that getting autistic over framerate is stupid. I suppose all those games you listed are shit, but some crap indieshit walking simulator is good so long as it runs at your desired framerate.

>>14085447

You gotta source on That? Because I am tired of their shit, but at the same time AMD is pretty behind on the video card market. I want a new video card but damn I don't really want to give nvidia money.

>>14087181

My point wasn't that indieshit is better because it holds a good framerate (A lot of indie walking simulators don't even have good framerate either). I was pointing out that games running like shit is nothing new and faggots simply don't remember that 3D games on average have always run like shit since the very beginning.

>>14087287

http://archive.is/7QTgO

They say they're in no rush to get their next GPU line out because they're Pascal GPUs are "just unbeatable".

>>14088013

Oh yeah, it'll be till may/june until the volta comes out for gaming specifically. Funny, the Ryzen+ will actually be coming before it.

xuck

>>14088088

>>14088176

>>14078166

I mean I'd rather have the grapes scenario than what we have right now, shit

>>14088177

Are you being serious right now retard?

>>14088208

Absolutely. I'd rather have games with "shit" graphics than unoptimized bloated ideological cinematic experiences.

>>14088280

That's what I said. At least that's what I meant to say in my first post, but then I re-read the post I replying to and saw that he was asking which would be WORSE, not better.

>>14088292

>I'd rather have the grapes

It is in fact not what you said.

>>14088303

I corrected myself immediately, are you really going to go on with this autistic fit of yours?

>Andy direct linking to McDonalds in the article

why?

>>14081673

>went to consoles because of piracy which is just a B.S. excuse

And JUST look where they are now. :DDD

>>14085569

You dumdum. I already know everything there is to about the universe.

>>14080301

I don't know, Turn10 managed to squeeze a lot out of the Xbox 360. If I look back at stuff like PGR, Forza (+Horizon) there's a lot of boundaries that had been pushed to get those games to run that good.