/vr/ - Retro Games

Nasir Gebelli (FF nes programmer) interviewed by Romero

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGzd7JRbxL0

I would really like to see the development of a game step by step. Like how they made the 3D models or sprites, the gameplay programming, the art and world... Something like that as one big documentary would be so cool.

>>5390928
There are literally a million youtube videos that do that. Making something that's entertaining for and understandable by someone who doesn't know anything about the process would probably be more difficult though.

I was part of the team responsible for Super Jump Man (later renamed Super Mario Bros) on the Famicom.
My job specifically was making sure the sky was the perfect shade of purple. AMA.

>>5391253
How does it feel to have had a hand in developing arguably the most famous beltscrollvania of all time?

>>5389962
That's fucking awesome
Assembly hackers are fucking crazy

Crash Bandicoot

>We all agreed that the “Sonic’s Ass,” game was an awesome idea. As far as we knew, no one had even begun work on bringing the best-selling-but-notoriously-difficult CAG to 3D. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, was said to be working on Yoshi’s Island, his massive ode to 2D action.

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

>RAM was still a major issue even then. The PS1 had 2MB of RAM, and we had to do crazy things to get the game to fit. We had levels with over 10MB of data in them, and this had to be paged in and out dynamically, without any "hitches"—loading lags where the frame rate would drop below 30 Hz.

https://www.quora.com/How-did-game-developers-pack-entire-games-into-so-little-memory-twenty-five-years-ago/answer/Dave-Baggett

>>5392345
Crash ironically isn't as technically impressive when you know the secret was that the game uses a pre-rendered depth buffer

Ultima Online

there are really good articles out there

>When we started up UO, we were very naive about some things. For one thing, the game design was originally for a MUCH smaller world. We were asked to change it from a 300 player game to a 3000 player game around nine months before ship. All of our expectations were for not only a smaller simulatenous population, but also for a smaller playerbase in general–forecasts for sales were not very high, and the most successful online game to date at that time was Meridian 59. We expected to do better, but not by an order of magnitude.

https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/a-uo-postmortem-of-sorts/

more here https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/09/24/ultima-online-is-twenty/

>Each shard (the term sharding probably originated with UO) was actually multiple game servers that pointed at one persistence DB, and that did data mirroring across the boundaries. The load balancing within a shard was statically determined by config files, and was simply boxes on the map -- nothing fancy. Race conditions here led to most of the dupe bugs, by the way.

>As Raph also notes, there were no databases originally involved in the storage of game state or player data for UO (disregarding analytics here), everything was kept in flat files. Backups worked by flagging a moment in time where no one was allowed to cross server-boundaries -- during that moment, each areaserver was commanded to fork(), essentially duplicating itself in memory (it's more complicated than this, thanks to Copy-on-Write, but let's simplify).

https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-technology-stack-driving-the-original-Ultima-Online-servers

Great articles written by the developers themselves

>>5389960
bump

Thief Development diary (Read from bottom to top)

>We've moved on to nailing down our design of the creature list and stealth systems. Since we're concentrating on a thief as player-character that last bit is going to be particularly important, and we've been putting our heads together over AI models, audiovisual cues, and a number of game rules to bring it all off. There's not a lot of precedents for a game concentrating so much on stealth: I told a friend of mine that we had a two-hour flame comparing our game to a submarine battle. She said she didn't understand how I got paid to do this stuff.

http://www.thief-thecircle.com/darkproj/darkdiary.html#2-26-97

>I was the primary author of the core rendering technology in Thief (although I didn't write the object or character renderers), as well as some related bits and pieces. The same rendering engine, modified by others to use 3D hardware acceleration, also did the rendering for System Shock 2 and Thief 2.
>The engine was written somewhat contemporaneously with Quake (despite the game being released much later), and the basic appearance strongly resembles Quake. Many of its technologies were copied from or inspired by Quake, but in many cases the way it works is slightly or significantly different.

http://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html))

>>5394514
>comparing our game to a submarine battle
kek

>>5394112

>>5389960
>Let's get started with the most boring and now irrelevant subject in the history of gaming interviews.

http://shmuplations.com/mariokart64/

>>5391253

How can I be sure you're not fake and gay?

>>5392356
That's explained in chapter 3 and it really looks impressive

>Dave and I experimented with pre-calculating the visibility and sort (the Playstation had no z-buffer, and hence no easy way to sort polygons) ahead of time on the SGI workstations the artists used. Although painful and expensive, this worked really well. As long as you could never SEE more than a set number of polygons (800 for Crash 1, 1300 for Crash 2 or 3) from any given position we could have perfect occlusion and sort, with no runtime cost. [...] So we decided to use an entirely SGI and IRIX based tool pipeline. In fact the game itself even ran on the SGI (with terrible keyboard control). This meant buying programmers $100,000 SGIs instead of $3,000 PCs. Gulp again. No one else did this. No one. And at the time, when a 50mhz Pentium with 8-32 megs of RAM was typical, our 250mhz 64 bit SGIs with 256 or 512 megs of RAM opened up totally different computational possibilities. By 1997 I had 4 gigs of ram in my machine! Of course some of those computational possibilities were so brutal that I had to code tools to distribute the calculations out to the video hardware, and chop it up onto all the office machines, where processing could be done in parallel 24 hours a day. Levels often took several hours to process on our 5-8 machine farm!

>So Dave created a level design tool where component parts were entered into a text file, and then a series of 10-15 Photoshop layers indicated how the parts were combined. The tool, known as the DLE, would build each chunk of the level and save it out. Artists tweaked their photoshop and text files, ran the tool, then loaded up chunks to look for errors. Or they might let the errors pass through the 8 hour level processing tool, there to possibly pick up or interact with new (or old) programmer bugs. If one was lucky, the result wouldn’t crash the Playstation.

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/

Bshhsgshaha

>For anyone who has ever worked on a PC game and poured their heart and soul into their work, they may have imagined in an optimistic moment, “If this game sells a million copies…” Maybe it was spoken out loud, or carefully whispered so that no one else would hear. It’s the expression of the dreams and promise of success that drives so many of us.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131844/postmortem_ensemble_studios_age_.php

>>5394514

>At one point, we had effects like beggars who had desires for GOLD, and thus followed rich players in the street. We had bears who would hang out in their cave, but would wander over to hang around near beehives. All that stuff worked. The problem was that the constant radial searches were incredibly expensive, and so was all the pathfinding.
>One of the first things to go was the search frequency. Next, the step was taken to put every creature to “sleep” when players were not nearby. This change alone really ruins the large-scale ecological applications completely. On top of that, the issues with spawning “overdrawing” the bank were not foreseen; in practice, it wasn’t MEAT that resulted in creatures not spawning. It was all the FUR and whatnot that ended up hoarded by players that prevented the deer and rabbits from returning.

The resource system was great, it is sad this level of ambition is nowdays lost.