/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.10780397]

>games like this used to only be 8mb
How the FUCK did they do it?

[Anonymous No.10780402]

>>10780397
Go ask >>>/g/ or >>>/vg/469591961

[Anonymous No.10780403]

>>10780397
Those 8mb back then were comparable to what about 50GB is today

[Anonymous No.10780407]

>>10780397
Also OP pic isnt that impressive Rocket Robot on Wheels exists.

[Anonymous No.10780427]

>>10780397
Games then:
>coded in C or the even more compact assembly
>few to no libraries included
>tiny polygon data
>about 2MB sprite and texture data or less, 5th gen consoles usually use merely 512KB texture data per loaded area because of VRAM capacity and memory bandwidth limitations
>sampled music and low bit rate sound effects

Games now:
>coded in very high level language (not the biggest contributor to file size bloat, but it does make the software run slower)
>many libraries needed (again, this is very far from the biggest contributor to file size bloat, but it still means your game install size will have to be bigger than 8MB no matter how simple your game is)
>trillions of polygons for a single NPC model that will melt your $400 GPU
>150GB 4K textures + 4K DLC skins
>uncompressed FLAC sound files and non optional voice files for all languages because fuck you

[Anonymous No.10780430]

>>10780427
>150GB 4K textures + 4K DLC skins
The worst part about this shit is that even those giga resolution textures tend to be muddy as fuck.

[Anonymous No.10780439]

>>10780427
has any publisher ever offered different downloads based on resolution?

[Anonymous No.10780442]

>>10780403
>Those 8mb back then were comparable to what about 50GB is today
Lmao no. A single PS1 CD can hold 700MB
Nintendo lost that gen for a reason

[Anonymous No.10780445]

>>10780439
Not retro but Bethesda offered a high-res texture pack for Fallout 4.

Also, I heard that Valve promised to release a high-res texture pack for Half-Life 2 shortly after the leaks happened and people found out they used super high-res textures for the time but apperantly that never happened.

[Anonymous No.10780446]

>>10780439
Dragon Age 2 had high-resolution textures as an optional DLC.

[Anonymous No.10780459]

>>10780439
Only a few titles have that. Most don't, even if it's absolutely effortless to do. Publishers just really don't care anymore about file size. This is why Steam is absolutely cancer, there is zero standard whatsoever.

[Anonymous No.10780809]

Games getting bigger is one of those things that make me think a lot. I don't think I can really pretend that it was precisely the games I grew up with were the ones with the best tradeoff between how big they were and how good they looked like, with everything before looking too rudimentary and everything afterwards being excessively bloated, it would be just too much of a coincidence. Plus, I'm sure that the first time someone made a game that was bigger than a floppy a lot of people thought, "we don't need games to be so big, the ones we have now are fine!" already. But even so, I still think that games getting too bloated is something real and not just nostalgia.

I remember the first time I played GTA3, it looked completely realistic to me, like nothing I had seen before. It was 2 CDs, 1.4 GB, which was a lot at the time, but I thought it was worth it. GTA4 required 10 times more disk space, and while it does look much better, I can't really say it looks "10 times better." GTA5 requires almost 10 times the space required by GTA4, but the visual difference between 5 and 4 is much smaller than that between 4 and 3.

At the end of the day I can say, yes, they game in the OP was only 8 MB, but bigger games that were made later are bigger because they actually look better. Yet at the same time I can't stop thinking that even though games keep getting bigger and bigger at a steady rate, the visuals improve much more slowly. I think we're approaching a limit, and in a few years we'll get games almost-almost-almost real that will be 10 times bigger than some other game released a few years before, and they'll be completely indistinguishable from each other.

[Anonymous No.10780837]

>>10780459
This is not a Steam problem, it's an unlimited space problem. The same thing happens on consoles too.

[Anonymous No.10780854]

>>10780397
quite simple
COMPOTENT
DEVS

[Anonymous No.10780889]

>>10780442
true but on a filled up ps1 disc how much of it is CD quality audio and video (i.e. video files, fmv etc)? I don't think the game itself is most of it usually.

[Anonymous No.10780897]

>>10780442
Final Fantasy VII is three discs but 90%+ of that data is just FMVs. The entire GAME is on all three discs, and it would easily be portable to the N64 since it was made using the SGI Onyx machines Square used for Super Mario RPG. I wouldn't expect you to know any of this considering how you probably have the same brain capacity as the rodent you posted, and you need your "games" to be interactive movies like Metal Gear Solid due to a lack of brain function and hand-eye coordination.

[Anonymous No.10780910]

>>10780809
>I can't stop thinking that even though games keep getting bigger and bigger at a steady rate, the visuals improve much more slowly.
Progress is just inconsistent, I wouldn't say it's slow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqoB7bgbEoY

[Anonymous No.10780928]

>>10780809
>GTA4 required 10 times more disk space, and while it does look much better, I can't really say it looks "10 times better."
That's the greatest thing about GTA 4. More than it tried to look better, it tried to BE better.

GTA 4's graphics might not seem like much, but the game looks much better than 3 in the animation, physics, and A-life departments. It felt like the most realistic game ever made, everything looked so organic and unreal. I never got that sense of realism from the previous GTA games. GTA 5 didn't feel like an upgrade at all. Maybe only in scale and graphics somewhat, that's about it, everything else was like a downgrade. Xbox 360 era was the last era video game tech leap really felt impactful. I think it was the first time we had powerful multithreaded CPUs that could handle physics and AI really well, and devs really went crazy with that new feature. Red Faction Guirella was the pinnacle of physics games, perhaps still is if we ignore the obscure voxel indie games. Hard drive also got really cheap and games became extremely huge and expansive and with mechanics that we could never imagine of. Traveling NPCs in Oblivion and Stalker really blew our minds back then.

Gaming hasn't been exciting at all ever since that generation ended, not sure what went wrong. I guess all gaming companies got too lazy and started to rely on graphics and only graphics to produce and sell their games quick. Back in the 360/PS3 era, companies considered physics and innovative mechanics as important as graphics, even more in some cases. Nowadays, they care about nothing but 4K assets and raytracing shit because that's the easiest and most risk free shortcut. And then you've got nintendo making sterile roblox clones for their baby tablet and getting hailed as the last bastion gaming by paid journos and zoomers that literally have't played anything made before 2014.

What's going the next big leap in gaming? AI lighting? AI written plot? It's all so tiring.

[Anonymous No.10780940]

>>10780809
>I remember the first time I played GTA3, it looked completely realistic to me, like nothing I had seen before. It was 2 CDs, 1.4 GB, which was a lot at the time, but I thought it was worth it. GTA4 required 10 times more disk space, and while it does look much better, I can't really say it looks "10 times better." GTA5 requires almost 10 times the space required by GTA4, but the visual difference between 5 and 4 is much smaller than that between 4 and 3.
Size of video games is not indicative of anything other than a developer's lack of skill, lack of time, or lack of optimization (these are also not exactly bad things given the circumstances). The reason GTA 4 is 10x bigger than GTA 3 but not 10x "better" is because once cartridges were out of the scene and discs were available, a huge chunk of time trying to cut invisible corners that the consumer would never see for optimization stopped being a necessity. Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII on PS3 have completely fucked up ISOs if you've ever dived into the data. Cutscene data and music is copied in multiple different parts of the ISO structure with no rhyme or reason as far as a human is concerned. But the PS3 was very concerned because it had a 2x read speed laser and having the music and cutscene data at various parts of the disc meant that the laser would have to travel less distance and reduce load times.

>>10780928
>What's going the next big leap in gaming? AI lighting? AI written plot? It's all so tiring.
In 10 years, our generation went from F-Zero to F-Zero X to F-Zero GX/AX. In 10 years, this generation has gone from GTA V to GTA V, Fortnite to Fortnite, Minecraft to Minecraft, and we've hit diminishing returns on graphical fidelity. My GTX 1070 will never need to be replaced at this rate as long as I stay gaming at 1920 x 1080. The next "big leap" is absolutely going to be AI and nobody is going to be happy except the shareholders who don't have to pay developers anymore.

[Anonymous No.10780942]

>>10780854
>COMPOTENT
Competent
Spelling

[Anonymous No.10780958]

>>10780403
8mb back then would have been more like a 2 TB COD game.

[Anonymous No.10780974]

>>10780940
>F-Zero X to F-Zero GX/AX
Actually that's the kind of thinking that got us here. These games did nothing spectacular other than looking good. They're just racing games, no different from those 3D sega cabinet stuff back in the day and ridge racer/wipeout on PS1. Meanwhile driving games that actually did spectacular things such as FlatOut 1 and the Driver series got sidelined. Their sequels became more sterile and more reliant on graphical prowess because few people appreciated their simulation mechanics.

>>10780910
>woah gwafix
It's really sad how every dev uses unreal now instead of choosing the most optimized engine out of many for the type of games they want to make. Photorealistic graphics has become the most risk free way to sell games, and everyone chooses the one engine that specializes on that. Gaming is boring now.

[Anonymous No.10780983]

>>10780974
Aesthetics are a VERY valid reason to pursue better graphical fidelity. I'd take the bloating of games any day if it meant more beautiful, timeless works were being produced. If the alternative is lazy, indie, "low poly" goyslop than it's the only option for me. Of course, games in the 2000s tend to be more aesthetically beautiful than their counterparts today, despite looking "worse". RE4 and the RE4 Demake comes to mind.

[Anonymous No.10781365]

>>10780397
Glover sucks

[Anonymous No.10781675]

>>10780897
Not true. Even the game wouldn't fit on an N64 carts because of the pretendered backgrounds (a critical part of the game)

[Anonymous No.10781676]

>>10781675
Resident Evil 2

[Anonymous No.10781683]

>>10781676
Talking about ff7. Re2 is not ff7

[Anonymous No.10781771]

>>10780809
I'm not sure how one could think GTA 3 looks realistic at all. It looks like a cartoon, intentionally.
I do get what you're saying, though. The reason is that there's massive diminishing returns for graphics fidelity starting at the 6th gen.

[Anonymous No.10781815]

I can find countless examples of modern indie games which weigh in at less than 100mb, probably less so when disregarding the file bloat that unfortunately comes with these prefab engines everyone is memed into using.

Really, it's another case of selective bias. Yes, companies are incentivized to not optimize, because:
>1. Bigger file size = Bigger game, to normalfags
>2. More space taken up = Less of an urge to delete the game
>3. No time spent on encodes and LOD algorithms = More time spent on useless bullshit

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy which only a select few non-AAA developers follow. And even then, they're just following the carrot.

[Anonymous No.10781850]

Games don't look interesting anymore.
Look at OPs image, the sky, the platform on the horizon, the grass, the stripes on the platfrom ahead, it doesn't make any sense but it's interesting to look at, and that isn't nowhere near the level of the actual good looking games of the past.
Now look at pic rel.
So many details in one scene, and literally nothing in it you'd care to look at. Ten thousand polygons and textures at a resolution higher than my eye can get and it still looks flat and artificial, while somehow looking just like real life to ensure there's no visual wonder on the scene, instead it just looks like that dude is going to ask you for crack money.
And that's a cyberpunk setting.

[Anonymous No.10781859]

>>10780397
palettized textures (or just plain colors where it's sufficient)
sequenced music
little to no spoken dialogue
no stupid video cutscenes

[Anonymous No.10781946]

>>10780397
The texture were 4kb

[Anonymous No.10781957]

>>10780897
The immediate tendie seethe lmao. Nintendo lost that gen, cope

[Anonymous No.10781964]

>>10780928
>Gaming hasn't been exciting at all ever since that generation ended, not sure what went wrong
It's a multi-faceted problem. It's partially what you mentioned on graphics becoming king in what makes a good game in the eyes of the developers and a decent amount of consumers. The graphical bump from PS2/Xbox to the PS3/360 era was incredibly noticeable. Same with the bump from PSX/N64 to the PS2/NGC era, but not as much. The bump from PS3/360 to PS4/XBone was minimal.

Another problem is the rise of DLC content. It became more profitable to release an incomplete game and sell off side stories that would have normally be included as side quests or objectives. That being said it was the PS3/360 era that had the on disk DLC. That didn't help at all despite the backlash.

Then lootboxes, shoe-horned battlepasses and other gacha mechanics became mainstream in games being developed and now the industry is just trying to wring your wallet dry as much as possible.

Also e-sports and streaming made it profitable to tryhard any game possible sucking the fun out of a game as efficiently as possible.

[Anonymous No.10783082]

>>10780442
>Nintendo Lost

Mario 64, Zelda and Goldeneye would never be the same in slow high latency optical discs. It would've crippled level size and design by a huge margin!

Look at Rayman 2, Shadow Man and Rainbow Six huge downgrade on PSX comparable to the N64 versions. Whats the point in having more space ?

Even games specifically design to PSX like Soul Reaver had content cut in half in order to ship the game.

the PS1 CD-ROM is, at most, a 2x speed drive. That means a maximum sustained data transfer rate of 300 KB/sec, and that comes at a ~300 millisecond seek time just to begin to read data , it's slower , Mario 64 , Zelda not even Mario Kart would never work with this kind of mediium. That's why most PS1 games had flat level designs or divided in smaller chunks to begin with.

On a ROM cartridge ,specified at 5 to 50 MiB/s and ROM access times are on the nanosecond scale - several orders of magnitude faster, being perhaps 200ns for a read. That would be 0.0002 milliseconds. As a result, you can just easily set up a texture paging scheme, dynamically allocating textures when they're needed, and swapping them out extremely quickly when they aren't needed anymore. The ultra-fast access speed makes this virtually seamless, and you only really need a relatively small amount of RAM needed to store basically what's just currently in view and maybe a little bit extra for stuff you recently saw. Anything else can be freed up and re-allocated when some texture that's not currently in view is about to be drawn.

The Nintendo 64 Disk Drive reads data at about one megabyte per second, which is roughly comparable to a 6X PC CD-ROM drive

The N64 is the only 3D home console with no loading times at all, something even today with high speed nvmes even we still have loading and transitions.
Dynamic music and randomizer content like the infinite Fractual Desert on Excite Byke , never ever om 2x compact discs.

[Anonymous No.10783092]

>>10780942
I dunno, maybe you're supposed to fertilize the devs first prior to harvesting.

[Anonymous No.10783109]

>>10780439
Stop being so anti-economical towards the gaming industry.
It's a big market, bigger than hollywood. How else do you think they are going to pay their beach houses? Think about the poor rich folks, they only way to secure their living is through the hard work of everyone else.

I even got a better idea to make this society better, just give all your hard earned money to big corporation!

[Anonymous No.10783120]

>>10783082
>Mario 64, Zelda and Goldeneye would never be the same in slow high latency optical discs.
Just add more RAM for CD buffer. RAM prices had fallen by the time N64 came out. PC RAM was only $5 per MB by the end of 1996. Slow 4MB page mode DRAM chips would have been even cheaper, it was slow and obsolete. Nintendo was just unbelievably stingy.
>Look at Rayman 2, Shadow Man and Rainbow Six huge downgrade on PSX comparable to the N64 versions.
That's because PS1 had weaker CPU. N64 has a 93MHz MIPS CPU and a dedicated vector calculation chip which practically houses a second MIPS CPU. PS1 does everything with its single 33MHz CPU. Actually it's very impressive how efficient the PS1 is with its limited computation power and RAM speed compared to N64. N64's single channel DRAM was really detrimental to its performance.
>Even games specifically design to PSX like Soul Reaver had content cut in half in order to ship the game.
That had nothing to do with the CD format, they had time and budget constraints. Would've been even worse if it was a cart game. They would have even less time to fix the bugs and ship the game, ROM cart manufacturing takes time.
>The N64 is the only 3D home console with no loading times at all
Wrong. Quake 2 had load time as it needed to decompress the data due to how limited ROM capacity is. You need to realize that N64 cart doesn't work like NES cart where the system has direct access to the ROM pages. Data needs to be transferred into the RAM. Also the cost for the consumer was much higher than if nintendo gave the N64 a CD drive and more RAM.
>something even today with high speed nvmes even we still have loading and transitions.
Without 4K assets we wouldn't. And let's not pretend that N64 games don't have transition and nintendo fans don't undergo transition.

[Anonymous No.10783128]

>>10781964
It sucks how e-sports are the only AAA games with fun gameplay and excellent optimization nowadays, and yet they're ruined by always online pvp crap and disgusting monetization on top of that. Imagine if CSGO or Valorant were doom, goldeneye, or duke nukem 3D like singleplayer games with thousands of hand crafted levels and unlimited hours of fun, with multiplayer only being a side feature.

[Anonymous No.10783143]

>>10783120
The very few games that presents a brief loading screen are Quake and TWINE, it's actually decompressing data. There are other PC to N64 ports that this never happens, you mention only one game ti generally impose all N64 games had loadings LMAO.

And about RAM you are really wrong

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-15-fi-32335-story.html

[Anonymous No.10783195]

>>10783143
>Quake and TWINE
There are more. Jet Force Gemini and Perfect Dark come to mind.
>it's actually decompressing data
That's why ROM sucks. You either have to spend more on higher capacity ROM or compress your game to hell and back to fit it in cheap carts. Even the lowest capacity N64 ROMs were a shit ton more expensive and harder to manufacture than CD, and there's a limit to how much you could compress your data.
>There are other PC to N64 ports that this never happens
Yeah ones that don't need as much data, which means simpler graphics or gameplay.
>you mention only one game ti generally impose all N64 games had loadings LMAO
N64 games that didn't have load screen whatsoever were either cheap shovelwares or cost a fortune to buy. That's just how ROM capacity works. You can't bend physics.
>https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-15-fi-32335-story.html
That's february 1995.
>indiana jones
They said "the RAM of the N64 never would have been remotely enough to fit any individual level" which is true because stock N64 only has 4MB. Wouldn't have been the case if it had more RAM.

[Anonymous No.10783326]

>>10783082
>wall of text did not read
N64 had a small handful of legitimately good games from a couple of publishers in a narrow range of genres and were carried by strength of their brand (especially parents buying for their children).
But N64 had nothing remotely close to the breadth of titles available on PS1.
Because almost all 3rd party developers preferred the platform for technical, license, and market reasons.

[Anonymous No.10785037]

>>10780427
One more reason why retro games are just better than modern ones.

[Anonymous No.10785087]

>>10780397
They didn't have a choice if they wanted to make an N64 game.

[Anonymous No.10785095]

>>10780442
>Nintendo lost that gen
No, that was Sega, they lost so bad they stopped making consoles.

[Anonymous No.10785185]

>>10783109
>>>/leftypol/

[Anonymous No.10785228]

>>10780427
you forgot DRM being like 40-60% of filesize

[Anonymous No.10785295]

>>10780889
Very few ps1 games even break 100megs outside of cd music and cutscenes. Years ago when people cared about bandwith and hosting games was a much more costly thing ps1 games often had rips where they had that kind of stuff cut out and most ps1 rips were between 20-80 megs.

[Anonymous No.10785297]

>>10780397
They actually streamlined code, for one.

[Anonymous No.10785309]

>>10780442
>>10785095
Atari never even made it out of the 90s. At least Sega made it to 2001.

[Anonymous No.10785325]

>>10780397
The guys that programmed those games grew up on ZX Spectrums and Commodores. They were used to having almost no space to do anything with.

[Anonymous No.10785396]

>>10780442
people who post faggot animal reactions like this should die

[Anonymous No.10785398]

>>10785396
lmao
Are you the >tranimals poster?

[Anonymous No.10785442]

>>10781850
I can't be the only one who thinks all AAA games for the last 10 years has looked objectively trash.
Hair always looks unnatural. Everything clips. Colours are always washed out. Textures are always strangely muddy. Minute details fold over on themselves and only get more jank the more fine they become.
The odd game that comes with an actual style can curb this but they always come with their own problems anyway. ("cartoony multiplayer shooter" = eye vomit)

[Anonymous No.10785445]

>>10785442
>I can't be the only one [modern game bad]
I forgot I was in /vr/, forgive me

[Anonymous No.10785449]

>>10785442
>Textures are always strangely muddy.
This is what pisses me off the most. 4K textures, 16x AF and they still look blurry as fuck.

[Anonymous No.10785495]

>>10780889
>>10785295
The biggest problem with ROM carts isn't capacity, but cost. By 1996 RAM prices had been free falling and using ROM made absolutely no sense anymore.

CD had 700MB, but devs would usually only store the essential game data in the outer edges of the disc to speed up seek and loading.