/vr/ - Retro Games

Limitation forced ingenuity and creativity. Also planned obsolescence. You wouldn't need to buy more storage space if compression was good.

>>8184321
Back then you still had loads of awful programmers that managed to fuck up basic things and make the most janky games possible. Devices were significantly simpler so you didn't even need to understand nearly as much of the machine as you do today, to squeeze out every inch of performance. The amount of things you had to learn to be a good programmer was similarly much smaller, and games were generally significantly simpler.
And with increasing complexity of course comes the increased need to abstract things away, which leads to things like OP mentions where no care is given to the disk space (and runtime processing) that these abstractions cost.
Then again, I've seen more than enough retro games with uncompressed graphics and code, wasting half their ROM because they had enough space for it.

>>8184321
>you had to be a master programmer to do even basic things
explain all the bloated jank games during the 80s and 90s

There are loads of games even some classics like SMB that are horribly programmed.

>>8184321
>What went wrong?
My Uni is so shit, I'll finish my CS degree soon and I can barely code.
My programming courses didn't rly cover anything that you couldn't learn with youtube videos.

Guess they expect us to learn everything more advanced by ourselves, but I can't be arsed to waste my free time on that shit.

I graduated with a computer science degree and I can't even code. Standards have fallen through the floor

>>8184463
How’s that possible? Just copy and pasted from Google?

>>8184321
High-end PS3 exclusives were crazy optimized and complex.

>>8184471
professors have care bear kiddy gloves and think everything is ok as long as you tried no matter how shallow of an effort you made
I've got no chance at a drop but fuck it I don't want to work in tech anyway.

>>8184471
Not that anon but I literally copied code from other students for some projects and my programming exam was 50% questions so if you answered those you could pass without coding lol.
Also we got points if the code compiled so you could get some points for a helloworld.

>>8184471
Yeah, most solutions already exist for the problems that the college (or uni) supplies you with. I've never felt more remorse then spending 4 years at college. Barely learning a thing. Got memed by my parents and some other stupid shits hyping it up.

It sucks desu. The only thing I really like to learn is Shader languages and CG. Which the schools in my area lack any sort of focus on a specific area

I barely can find a job without getting email spammed with pajeet recruiters which I get turned down anyway.

>>8184321
the layers of abstraction and the use of bloated libraries is why the calculator app is 24kb instead of 240mb. the actual number crunching routines probably make up very little of the 240mb and hasnt change that much, its stuff like the GUI, etc that make up the rest of the 240mb.

>>8184321
There's more programmers now than ever, which can cause saturation and lead to what you're seeing. Plus, programming is kiiiiiinnnnnd of easier to do nowadays, which I don't mean that as necessarily a good thing, since the convenience also seems to have brought more bad habits with it as well.

I do think today's programmers are spoiled. Lots of kids in school just use python with some library that has all their functions already made for them.

>>8184321
>Back in the 70s, 80s, 90s you had to be a master programmer to do even basic things, you had to be able to optimize and compress code.
not true. look at something like pokemon. most profitable franchise ever made and they fucked up basic shit like greater than/ less than signs
>Back then they could write a scientific calculator app in 24kb, now it'd be 240mb or more.
shut up
>What went wrong?
the NES has 2 KB of RAM, though games like smb3 came with additional on cart RAM (8 KB in this case). the playstation 5 has 16000000 KB. smb3 is 384 KB. the new ratchet and clank is more than 33000000 KB.
now graphics and sound are a big part of that but the point is no one is going to code a AAA PS5 game in assembly. that's stupid as fuck. you program at the high level and use libraries whenever you can because games are impossibly larger now.

>>8184496
It's like how PS1 games would have 15MB of code and 240MB of graphics and sound data.

>be me
>Take all the theory computer science courses that only require you to study from a book because I know I suck at coding
>Professors praise me for doing so well in these 'harder' courses
>get on their good sides
>Graduate without ever having to write code beyond my first year of college

Jokes on me though, I'm unemployable

>>8184502
I took coding classes in college and I ended up getting it for this reason. Felt like I was getting no understanding whatsoever into how these systems work but I was still getting perfect marks
Totally unsatisfying

>>8184504
>smb3 is 384 KB
The actual code portion is about 128k, the rest is graphics and level data.

>>8184521
Yeah, I felt the same way. It wasn't until I began writing my own libraries that I finally "understood" what the programming language was actually doing. Lots of kids just take functions for granted and don't question how or why they work.

>>8184521
It really, really depends on the professors you get. I took classes with an enthusiastic, knowledgeable prof who also used the subject as way to introduce comp sci notions and it was one of the best series of classes I took in higher education, even though they had nothing to do with my degree.

>>8184526
yeah but i wasn't going to pull the actual code portion out of a ps5 game so i might as well compare apples to apples

>>8184447
>>8184463
Same here. CS degree is a scam at this point. You're unironically better off doing unpaid internships at startups while living with your parents for 4 years.

>>8184447
I took one programming class that was just Powerpoint presentations and didn't get anything out of it. Left that course with a D- and thought I was a moron. I have since gotten a job in development and I have learned so much more about development during my first two months than I ever did during high school and college.

>>8184515
why's life so unfair

>>8184321
Yes and they realize that optimization is not worth it when you have gigs of RAM and modern CPUs can do 10s of billions of cycles per second and write 1/10th the amount of code. It’s all about how fast you can deliver the product these days.

>>8184504
>you program at the high level and use libraries whenever you can because games are impossibly larger now
But again the code portion is not that big. Using C simply makes it easier to manage your code.

>>8184321
This is kind of getting into /g/ territory, but there are a couple reasons that modern software is so bloated.

On one side, there's no incentive to make high quality software because there's no money in it. In the old days software was something you'd buy because it was useful in itself. Today most software is something that's inflicted on you as a side effect of some other good or service you want:
- want to read the news? go to our website and wait while we make your browser download 50MB of javascript bloat first
- want to hail a taxi? download our app to your phone first
- want to chat with your friends? download our bloated "discord" client, and don't even think about using a third party client instead, it's against the rules and we'll ban you ;)
How many people choose to forgo such things because of bad attached software? Not many I'd bet - so companies have no reason to take the extra time to write good software when bad software works just as well as far as profit is concerned.

On the other side, there's a kind of religion within programming that code should be "reusable". If you're a believer in today's "best practices" you can't just write a calculator that evaluates expressions of decimal numbers. You have to write an expression parsing framework which can be configured to support any kind of operators, not just + - * /. You have to write an algebra framework that can operate on any possible kind of number-like object, like complex numbers or matrices or Einstein tensors or whatever. And finally you can build your plain old calculator on top of that. It'll be way bigger and slower than necessary, but hey, if you ever want to make a different kind of calculator in the future (you won't) you'll have all that reusable code ready to go!
Modern software is made out of, at every level, components that are far more general than actually needed. The culmination of this is Electron, the GUI framework that's actually a web browser underneath (no joke).

>>8184570
You were supposed to develop something in HS and college.

>>8184582
Lol. Using C makes EVERYTHING more complex.

>>8184321
no one cares about space now. back then it took more skill. modern dev is a fucking mess.

>>8184584
Yeah, that didn't happen. I wished I had more confidence in myself back then to just tackle it myself and not even bother with classes and the assumption that higher education will absolutely make me capable of jobs that require a degree. Getting my first real job was an eye opener to how much BS needing a college degree was in general. All my current technical background starts on a retail level with zero college involved.

>>8184616
embedded devs do.

Top tier programmers are making things like operating systems, compilers, emulators, drivers, or working in cyber security.

>>8184669
>tfw Kernighan wrote the first book about C programming but didn't even understand how the language works on a deeper level
And that was in the 70s

>>8184321
>What went wrong?
Game engines happened.
Back then people often had to write their own shit from scratch to make some feature or other that they wanted to work. Now you can buy the damn things and be as lazy as you want with your bloated Unity garbage games.

>>8184442
SMB is well programmed.
Mario 64, on the other hand...
Both don't appear to have ACE bugs, for SMB 1 it's because it's just too well programmed, and the running theory for Mario 64 is that it's so fucking broken it's stabilizing itself.

>>8184583
>This is kind of getting into /g/ territory
Oh, you think?

>>>/g/83579520

>>8184728
>Mario 64, on the other hand...
>and the running theory for Mario 64 is that it's so fucking broken it's stabilizing itself.
That explains why the decompiling project took so damn long.

>>8184496
Just remember, GUIs themselves aren't the problem. It's the libraries that do too much and aren't modular in the slightest.
The death of modularity in programming has fucked up almost everything.

>>8184321
>Back in the 70s, 80s, 90s you had to be a master programmer to do even basic things
What a dumb fucking thing to believe. Romanticizing the past is poisoning your brain.

>>8184447
>I can barely code.
What do people actually mean when they say that? Like where is your limit? What kind of project is over that limit? Are there programs you would have no idea where to even begin to create?

>>8184321
Yes, but they are all interested in crypto now instead of games.

>>8184719
bullshit

>>8184515
Why is learning to code so impossible

>>8184782
Programming is not only like learning a whole new language, but solving a 2 billion* piece jigsaw puzzle at the same time.

*Depends on the size of the project, obviously, but on average, it's about this complex.

>>8184795
It kinda is like learning language. And I don't mean the syntax stuff here, but actually mastering it by doing actual projects of >50k lines of codes you actually are interested it rather than working on exercises and following courses.

>>8184627
true im stuck in web hell =\

>>8184669
...

You just proved OP's point.

>>8184321
It still amazes me that something like Urban Chaos could (poorly) run on a PlayStation One.
The source code for the game was released, by the way.
https://github.com/dizzy2003/MuckyFoot-UrbanChaos

>>8185147
That was a PC game ported to consoles. The PC market was and still is dependent on optimizing the game as best as you can to make it run on as many computers as possible, and thus increase buyers. Console games have much less picky buyers, which is why console games, especially today, shipped in such a messy, janky state. Nowadays you make games primarily for consoles and the PC version, live and let live. If you want to make games for PC (either exclusive or primary platform) you'll have to make it look like an SNES or PS1 game because most computers in the world are ridiculously weak. All PS4s can run call of duty at sub 1080p 60-fps-staring-at-the-ground with comically low resolution textures, but some PCs can't even play Undertale.

Bump.

>>8184321
WHAT DOES THE REDDIT FROG HAVE TO DO WITH THAT?