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When you see what ONE coder was able to do in the 80s, with 64K of RAM, on a 4MHz CPU, and in assembly, it's quite incredible. I miss my Amstrad CPC6128 and all its good games.
Still happens.
Animal Well was coded by one guy, and it was ~35mb on release (I think it's above 100 at this point after a few updates, but still). The game is massive and pretty complex. And it's the size of an SNES ROM.
Dwarf Fortress has to be one of the most complex simulations ever created, developed by two brothers and given out for free for several decades. The game, prior to adding actual graphics, DF was ~100mb and the Steam version is still remarkably compact.
I am consistently amazed by people's ingenuity with this stuff.
SNES ROMs were actually around 4MB. People always spoke about them being 32 Meg or whatever, but they meant megabits.
I did like Animal Well, but gave up after looking at one of the bunny solutions and deciding I didn't have the patience for that.
I think most of the size of games is just graphics and audio. I think the code for most games is pretty small, but for some godforsaken reason it's really important that they include incredibly detailed doorknobs and 50 hours of high quality speech for a dozen languages in raw format.
I think most of the size of games is just graphics and audio. I think the code for most games is pretty small, but for some godforsaken reason it's really important that they include incredibly detailed doorknobs and 50 hours of high quality speech for a dozen languages in raw format.
True. Even Xonotic - opensource game - has very small game engine, but game logic and assets(maps, textures, lightmaps) are 1 gig. And same with AltCraft - small engine, but minecraft assets are huge.
When you see what they did in the 60s and 70s, where they ran an entire country's social security system in a mainframe with a whooping 16Kb of memory (I'm not sure if it was 4 or 16, but it doesn't make that much difference).