Then vs Now
Then vs Now
265 comments
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Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.
Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.
Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.
Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.
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There's some nostalgia goggles for sure.
I mean, the demo for Rollercoaster Tycoon (Mr. "Hand coded in assembly" there) bricked our Windows 98 machine when i installed it as a kid. My dad was pissed: we had to reformat the harddrive, reinstall windows, all that.
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Yeah I remember the specific clock speed thing! I had a game that I loved on a friend's computer and didn't get to play it much. Some sort of space sim / combat game. Years later I had my own much more powerful machine and was hyped to check it out. Installed via dosbox or whatever, loaded it up, and it ran at fucking 10x speed! It took seconds to walk around a city and the combat was completely unplayable. So sad but also pretty funny. No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware. If you want an easier game, just get a worse computer apparently.
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No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware.
It's the most trivial and straight forward thing to do. The game is a simple loop of:
- get user input (can be nothing)
- calculate new game state based on old state and input
- draw new game state.
The speed of the game is now 100% dependant on the speed of computation. NOT attaching fps to hardware is the hard thing, as you need to detach the game state loop and the drawing loop and then synchronize them. Doing that yourself is extremely complicated. Today developers don't even need to think about that because the whole drawing loop is abstracted away by things like directX/Vulcan and the game engine. But without those tools, fps tied to CPU speed is basically the default.
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The last time I had that bug was with Oblivion.
It was the first time I played it and found the combat frustratingly difficult because of the increased speed. Especially in dungeons where I had to bait enemies one by one just to not get overwhelmed. One hand was always holding a healing spell as well.
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If you try it again, emulators like dosbox let you slow the game down to be playable. I don’t remember the exact setting but I’ve had to do it on things like Freddy Farkas iirc.
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At my buddy's house, he had a game called something like 'wings of glory' that was meant for an older clock speed. We were messing with the turbo button and it quickly became unplayable when not in the slower mode.
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Ecco the dolphin was made specifically hard to ensure people couldn't beat it on rental during a weekend.
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Right. That was common, too. Games were tiny and very expensive, so broken balance was often used to pad out length. And yeah, it got crazy once Americans started popularizing rental and publishers got desperate to make the games less economical to beat without purchasing them.
I did finish Ecco 1 legit, though. Once.
I've tried the last couple of stages a few times. I still don't understand how tween me managed that. Even on a CRT with original hardware and zero lag that's a stupid thing to try to do.
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Bigger was better, since a larger game meant they packed in more content. Now the bloat is out of control since all game content is delivered over the Internet.
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Bloat is out of control because games are HUGE and you can often trade size for performance if you have enough memory to do so.
Also, memory used to be extremely expensive, especially catridge ROMs. Outside of the Switch this is less of a concern now, that's true, but the tradeoff is you get to have pin-sharp high resolution assets and tons of performance optimizations instead of... you know, just chopping enough frames of animation to fit your sprites in 16 megabits then charge a hundred bucks for the extra-sized cart. You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now for the money it used to cost to buy a single game shipped on a cartridge.
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I remember reading an early-2000s book on game dev. It did mention that some game (I want to say one of the Unreal games, but I can't recall for sure) had to code their level loading in assembler because it was taking upwards of 10 minutes in C++.
Yeah, I definitely think the OP has super rose-colored glasses on. The free shareware was pretty awesome, though. I had one called "80 mega-hits" or something like that with a ton of games (many of which my poor old PC couldn't run).
I do think that optimization has slacked off more as hardware prices generally trended down. Disk space I don't so much mind, but memory and CPU are still expensive.
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This is one of those things where I'm not sure what people mean when they say it.
There are bugs that affect performance, and yeah, we're generally more likely to see bugs fro several reasons now. But there's also games just being heavy. We're not in a cycle where the top of the line hardware just maxes out many games, because... well, we're doing real time path-tracing, we have monitors that go up to 400 Hz and resolutions up to 4K. The times of "set it to Ultra and forget about it" with a 1080 are gone and not coming back for a really long time. Plus everything has to scale wider now, because on the other end we have actual handhelds now, which is nuts.
So yeah, I'm not sure which one people are complaining about these days. I'll say that if you can play a game in a handheld PC and then crank it up to look like an offline rendered path traced movie that's way more thought to scalability than older games ever had, but maybe that's a slightly different conversation.
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The "free shareware" thing is kind of back. I've been noticing more and more games producing demos; check out Steam Next fest, for example.
I also remember playing a ton of games from a CD. I had a Mac at the time, but it was "dos compatible", which meant it had a 486 in addition to the Mac processor at the time, so you could switch over into dos, though you could only allocate half the ram to it.
We ended up installing Windows 95 to play a lot of the games, which ran great on the available 4 MB of RAM.
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I used to have a meta-game where I tried to fit X-wing and Windows 3.1 on the same 40MB hard drive. Just barely made it.
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I remember that for MegaMan we needed to turn off the turbo (yes the CPU button) or it ran really fast.
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Maybe the opposite, the turbo button actually slowed down the CPU so you could play games that had a speed limit.
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CDs could do 500 Mb
It was actually 700 MB
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Oh, no. It was not.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you'd mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you'd need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.
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I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes
Same, in my case as a European. PAL is weird.
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Oh, that's a whole other subject. "Old games were so polished and fully finished". Meanwhile, half of the planet was either playing games squished down, in slow motion or both. And most of them didn't even know.
It's not as simple as that, either. May people think all games ran 15% slower. Many games did have some retiming somewhere, but it was definitely not great and people didn't complain because with no internet, they often didn't realize what was going on.
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I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished.
I remember doing this Battle of Britain and TIE Fighter! Man, memories.
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"Then" is just indie today.
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That and it easily running on Linux, either naively or though Proton, is why I haven't touched any AAA in like... at least 5 years? Maybe closer to 10.
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A lot of today's indie devs are also... well...
groomerwojak.jpg: "I groomed a teen fan of mine, and when she came forward I made her to write an apology, also I spent my Patreon money on a sexdoll, and my code is spaghetti."
"We barely managed to make a functioning game with premade assets, and our popularity was so dependent on Pokémon not performing well, our fanbase is a toxic cesspool as a result, who can't express the love to the game without actively dissing Nintendo."
"I'm a bigoted con artist who rebrands every time they get busted for his crappy horror game."
"Optimization? We are already using low-poly assets!"
"The assets in our pixelart games are very unaligned, and we use high-resolution fonts because no one makes bitmap fonts anymore."
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I mean nobody said all indie devs were great, i just think that if you want to find examples of good game development today you're largely going to find the stars are indie, not triple A
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The meme does specify AAA
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But only for today. The concept of triple A didn't really exist back then, and at least one of the "then" game devs was totally indie for the game he made
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Games back then : created by 1 to 4 people with autism because they wanted to have fun on a computer
Games now : driven by dickheads that just left business school at the whims of billionaire conglomoration funds.
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To be fair, game devs did the hackiest shit to deal with the constraints of the time. They did things that no programmer would do today because they're bad practices when you're not worried about tiny amounts of RAM or storage.
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I love watching videos about old game systems programming. The gymnastics you had to do to code, like, super Mario, just to show more than 3 colors is really interesting.
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You will probably enjoy this video: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=nYDmBdUalgo
Dude livestreamed Super Mario 64 for more than a month with a bot attached that perfectly abused a physics quirk based on floating point precision, just so he can crash the game at 0:00 at New Year's by overflowing a value. This over-one-hour-long video is the summary.
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If you haven't seen them, look up the Ultimate talk on YouTube. They go into real depth on c64, Gameboy, Atari, Amiga, etc. development and all the tricks that are used.
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The games then were closer to embedded dev than software dev. The cartridge had huge limitations and the devs had to know those limits and work around them.
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I think it was David Braben that used the video buffer as extra ram. Coded text on screen in the same colour blue as the sky and stored it there.
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Sometimes they did it just in case they needed those limited resources, but its not really needed. SMW is a good example, where spite interactions are only checked every other frame, but modders generally remove that limitation without any issues. There might be weird edge cases where in vanilla without glitches you could theoretically accumulate enough sprite on stream it causes a slightly more noticeable slowdown without the ever other frame. With cape float, it only checks if you are holding the jump button once every 4 frames or something like that. Totally unnecessary and makes the game feel less responsive. Granted, during a casual playthrough, you'd probably never notice that floating stopping after letting go of the button varies by 50ms depending on which frame you let go of the button relative to which frame it checks.
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And even then the code was far from the best it could be.
This guy optimized Super Mario 64 and drastically improved performance while fixing several bugs.
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Problems with game developers might better be understood as problems with capitalism, to paraphrase Ted Chiang
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We can’t update games or refactor code to make it smaller bc our bosses demand we constantly work harder, better, faster, stronger. They force us into games that require more expensive hardware bc the entire tech industry depends on people upgrading every other year. And it’s online constantly bc we hoover up player data for our new profit centre where we sell all your data.
And now they made a meme that deflects blame off them and onto devs, who have way more contact w the public than anonymous rich people
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CaPiTaLiSm HNNNNNGGGG!
Capitalism was a thing back before games got shitty too.
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Enshittification is just another name for the type of capitalism America practices.
Everything gets worse because it's not profitable to stay good when there are only 147 umbrella corps worldwide. Capitalism doesn't reward innovation in products when monopolies exist, it rewards innovations in minutiae of existing products.
See also: DLC, Premium Passes, Microtransactions, Seasonal Content, Free-to-Play*, Ads in AAA tier games and everywhere else, Subscriptions, and every other shitty innovation the market (no not consumers, shareholders) rewards.
That's to say nothing of how these companies extract the value of their employees labor and then lay them off to keep turnover at whatver level the coke addicts in the c-suite have determined is best. Crunchtime, harrassment, fuck man look at Bobby fucking Kotnick and his blizzard shitshow.
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Tetris: hold my beer
Socialism intensifies
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Qhile that is true the effects of it were lesser since it was more niche. Plus some of the best games are still in their own weird niche, ive been playing STALKER GAMMA which is a free modpack for a free mod, and help I am being consumed! I DREAM OF REPAIR KITS AND GUN ANIMATION, HNNNNNNGH KILL MONOLITH!
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So we're just gonna conveniently forget all the shovelware from that time period?
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Yes. Because older is always better. Then when the present is the before times people will look back fondly on it too.
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Yeah, heavy survivorship bias in this one.
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Everyone seems to think that games like Doom and Half-Life came out all the time. I remember looking at shareware disks in shops and seeing loads of games that looked like total crap.
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For sure! just go to Abandonware and try to go to a specific year to find something. You have to wade through pages of garbo to find something worth playing.
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One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was digging through the "1000s of Games" disc I had that was full of demos, shovelware, Doom mods, and tons of other garbage. Occasionally you'd find a diamond hidden in the turds.
There's even a Youtuber who does "Shovelware Diggers" as a show and it's just that! Him and his community riffle around in old shareware collections looking for treasures, which he showcases. (Edit to add: Looked it up and he ended the show after 300 episodes! He still does other retro gaming stuff too. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCIZNtotF3Xh0dfQjJx8XcP_73UGtjqN0&si=Gvx5W0mmjTE48z79 )
But yeah, most of the content on those discs would have qualified more as viruses than games, if they even ran in the first place!
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Rollercoaster Tycoon was 1999, so I'll choose to believe that the "then" era was after the big gaming crash of the 80s. There was still shovelware, but it wasn't nearly as bad as during the 80s when you'd see mountains and mountains of terrible, non-functioning games. I don't think anyone really has nostalgia for that period of gaming, but the late 90s to early 2000s really were as close to a golden age as we ever got.
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Gaming crash was more of a console thing. One of the arguments was why you should buy a console when you can buy a computer for a bit more and do so much more. Computer games ran through it mostly unfazed.
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Or all the shitty licensed games. I'm sure there's a number of older gamers triggered by the LJN logo.
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I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.
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I played some pretty good games on the 48k spectrum back in the day. My first computer was a zx81 with 1k ram, it was a bit challenging to do anything interesting with it - but people still wrote games for the thing.
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While true that it's impressive, now games have to be made to work on variable screen sizes with different input controllers, key mappings, configurations, more operating systems, with more features than ever. It's an absolute explosion of complexity.
Even making a 2D game for today's hardware is more difficult than making a 2D game for Gameboy.
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Honest question, is that true? It's my understanding that developing a 2D game today would be a simpler task than for a system from the 90s due to so many improvements in development software.
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You realize it's not devs that make those decisions, right? It's publishers and execs. You know, the guys who make the actual money in all this. Stop blaming devs for stupid exec decisions.
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So glad to see op being called out in the comments
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Well, you're right. However if no dev stands for that it couldn't get made.
Of course I also understand that devs want to eat, too. But the truth is somewhere in between.
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Meh, it depends on which of the issues you're flagging. Games are large for understandable reasons, both technical and practical. The optimization problem is... complicated, and my thoughts on it get really into the weeds, but it's not as simple as people would think. And I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the "can't fix our game" panel, because at best it makes no sense.
The always-online thing is maybe the most controversial, and you'd definitely find the most developers who agree with you on that unconditionally. But also, tons of offline games get made on all types of scopes.
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Yeav plus games today are way more complicated so there is a LOT more to optimize, and the execs are rushing those games out
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"WHY ARE YOU PIRATING OUR GAMES???"
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BECAUSE IF BUYING ISNT OWNING THE PIRATING ISNT STEALING.
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It seems like a clever qoute when you first hear it, but stealing a rental or a lease is still stealing.
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"Because it's easy... And it does a lot of damage."
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Great happy souls refrence.
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Disgruntled kitty isn't gruntled.
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Not just games . I download one of the trendy note pad apps. It’s 500mb.
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I've been using zoho notes on my phone for a long time now. It started out really good, but somehow has become so bloated that it's laggy. It's PLAIN TEXT. How do you make that lag??
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Thanks for supporting shitcoin mining, I'm so close to recouping my goal of 10% of the thousands of dollars I've lost.
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Which one? Obsidian for desktop is 400MB, but it lets you make knowledge trees and includes a zotero extension. Although maybe it doesn’t need to be 400MB.
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Obsidian was big - I think close to 500 on the mac ? But Logseq was another
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Very rose tinted glasses. I remember horrifying cache corruption bugs that locked you out of certain game areas permanently on that save, random illegal operation exceptions crashing games (no autosave btw), the whole system regularly freezing and needing to be completely restarted, games just inexplicably not working to begin with on a regular basis because of some hardware incompatibility and the internet sucked for finding fixes then and patches weren't a thing so you were just screwed.
I would say that games not all being written in C and assembly trying to squeeze out every possible performance efficiency with nothing but dev machismo as safeguards is in fact a good thing.
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Here's revelation: most game engines are written in C(++)
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Yes, but they are made by different people and all those bugs have been worked out over time. The people actually making the games are doing so at a higher level with more safeguards and it shows.
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What a horrible take. Game devs were so bad at one point in the past they almost killed the entire market. Classic survivorship bias here.
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That's because the business assholes flooded the market with shitty games that cost $120 (adjusted for inflation) that looked like this :
https://i.imgur.com/yQAWeYw.jpeg
Not the game dev's fault, it's the business asshole's fault, just like the image.
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Not the entire market, only the American one. Everywhere else was doing fine.
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Game devs were so bad at one point in the past they almost killed the entire market
which event are you refering to?
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There was a period of time when a massive influx of shovelware was released. Think stuff like the ET game. No one wanted to buy it, and the industry almost became a bust. Nintendo came in and almost single handedly revived the entire industry by releasing novel, high quality games like donkey kong. This is why Nintendo is a modern household name and why you mostly see atari in museums.
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For those that are unaware, the second chad is most likely referring to .kkrieger. Not a full game, but a demo (from a demoscene) whose purpose was to make a fully playable game with a max size of 96kb. Even going very slow, you won't need more than 5 minutes to finish it.
The startup is very CPU heavy and takes a while, even on modern systems, because it generates all the geometry, textures, lighting and whatnot from stored procedures.
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I remember beating that and just being really surprised at how well it worked
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Fuck the haters. 80s game devs were creating beauty out of nothing.
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I wasn't exactly old enough to have experienced this, but I know there was a time that if you wanted to play a PC game, you didn't buy it on a floppy or a disc; you got a book with code that you had to type up and compile yourself. If you did more than just follow the book, you could understand it and change it to be whatever you wanted!
This is why I wish everything was open source. If I don't like the way something is done, I can tweak it. Any part of it and make it perfect for me.
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That was more the zx spectrum / commodore era and even then you could still buy most things on tape. Magazines used to print code though.
At least until the cover tape wars started. Then it got crazy.
But yeah, I remember taking shifts with my pal typing lines in. One mistake and you got to learn the joys of debugging at age 7.
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You can go to GOG, buy some really old game, install it on a PC, play it and after a few minutes go: "How the fk was I so dazzled with this shit back then?!"
At least for me, whilst most such game were A LOT of fun back then, almost all of them feel kinda meh nowadays, the graphics-heavy ones because they look like shit now compared to even games from 10 year ago and the other ones because their game mechanics are so shallow and simplistic (and often oh so reliant on reaction times) compared to even what Indie companies have been doing in the last couple of decades.
Yeah, the memory of the fun that was had survived the passage of time, but most of those games pale in comparisson to games I've played in the last 2 decades. Beware of confusing the two like the sterotypical old person who complains "Music was much better when I was young, before Rock-n-Roll".
PS: I'm not even especially big on fancy graphics but instead prefer complex multi-layered game mechanics, so the kind of games from back then I still can enjoy today are things like Civilization.
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“How the fk was I so dazzled with this shit back then?!”
Lack of games to compare to, mostly. For instance, how many games could you compare Warcraft to, back in 1994? Probably only Dune II. By 1999, any RTS game would be compared to Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation and possibly others. "Doom clone" remained the definition of FPS for roughly 3 years. Meanwhile, every platformer since the late 80s was compared to half the catalogue available on the NES. Something something "learning from others' mistakes, standing on the shoulders of giants"
Not every old game is a gem, just like not every modern game is trash. One of my personal old favorites that holds up well is Jedi Outcast. Does a better job at making you feel like a lightsaber wielding jedi than Force Unleashed
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Lemmings was not the product of a huge corporation.
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I see stuff like this and I don't blame developers/coders for all the shit that's happening. If you objectively look at gameplay and such, most games are actually pretty decent on their own. The graphics are usually really nice and the story is adequate, if not quite good, the controls are sensible and responsive...
A lot of the major complaints about modern games isn't necessarily what the devs are making, it's more about what the garbage company demands is done as part of the whole thing. Online only single player is entirely about control, keeping you from pirating the game (or at least trying to) plus supplying on you and serving you ads and such... Bad releases are because stuff gets pushed out the door before it's ready because the company needs more numbers for their profit reports, so things that haven't been given enough time and need more work get pushed onto paying customers. Day one patches are normal because between the time they seed the game to distributors like valve and Microsoft and stuff, and the time the game unlocks for launch day, stuff is still being actively worked on and fixed.
The large game studios have turned the whole thing into a meat grinder to just pump money out of their customers as much as possible and as often as possible, and they've basically ruined a lot of the simple expectations for game releases, like having a game that works and that performs adequately and doesn't crash or need huge extras (like updates) to work on day 1....
Developers themselves aren't the problem. Studios are the problem and they keep consolidating into a horrible mass of consumer hostile policies.
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"The inverse square root function in the C math library isn't fast enough. That's okay, I'll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster."
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Step 2: what the fuck?
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I never thought game patches would become such a terrible thing. But the state some games have released in has been crazy.
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...Is the breast milk thing inspired by reality? Wait, I don't know if I really want to know.
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Blizzard I think
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🤢 Thanks, I guess.
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DAE games bad now??
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it's not devs fault, is the company
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If only the buyers of the games would realize how good it used to be. They control this awful market.
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This is so true. Also let's not forget where game is almost unplayable and constantly crashing on release.
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I hate this conflation of "Developer" with every other role in modern game development.
If you think the new Porsche looks shit, do you blame the Mecanical engineer who designed the brake mechanism?
If your new manga body pillow gives you a rash, do you blame the graphic designer of the manga?
There is not a single thing listed in the meme above that is actually the fault of the actual developers working on the game. Don't even need to talk about the first picture.
game size is studio management related. They want to stuff as much (repetitive, boring) content into the game as possible. Plus a multiplayer mode no one asked for.
Optimizations don't happen because the CEO decides to take the sales money of the game this quarter, and not next, and ships an unfinished product.
Always online is ALWAYS a management decision.
It's a shit joke, it's wrong because it blames the wrong people, and its also just dumb.
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those always online "single-player" games aren't what you think.
your ads and tracking friends are always interested in playing with you.
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Play Xonotic. I get 200 fps on Intel HD Graphics 2000.
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I absolutely love Xonotic! This is my hype song! https://youtu.be/pLKo5TitJm4?si=wDW8dQCpbaraiNZP
YouTube knows what I like.
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Also add Red Eclipse to the queue and get lost in the adrenaline this week.
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Besides being a maintenance fucking nightmare, wouldn't writing a game in assembly make it a lot harder to be cross platform? I really don't get that panel.
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Yes, yes it would. They meant to say that it would improve performance (if done well, which it was). That improved performance would allow it to run on a wide variety of devices, including those with low specs.
Also at the time writing for x86 only would have been plenty portable. Even today that would cover "standard" PC architecture. (Although nowadays you probably want to put it on mobile devices, gaming consoles or macOS, so not ideal.)
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Yeah, it being about performance makes sense. Still don't know how that dude managed to write a full-ass game in assembly though. Takes a special brain to even be able to think that way.
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That idea comes from the tycoon games because they run on newer windows versions easily. But it's not because they were made in assembly. Any programming language can do that as long as the program doesn't depend on specific OS features that get changed or removed. I think assembly is just synonymous with everything being from scratch.
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I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.
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Yeah exactly. Apparently they meant "most machines" as in "most machines that could run windows". Like in a performance sense. Weird way to put it imo, since "most machines" to me would refer to platform concerns.
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Ok, that got me. I still remember the days of ZX and that funny noise... But I do have a question for one part of the meme: can someone explain to me why on Earth the updates now weigh these tens of gigs? I can accept that hires textures and other assets can take that space, but these are most likely not the bits that are being updated most of the time. Why don't devs just take the code they actually update and send that our way?
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The trick is to download the Fitgirl repack. Cheaper on your wallet and your hard drive.
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I am perfectly fine with paying developers, as I buy only the games i do like after some testing ) Going the repack route is unpredictable - no updates, may contain whatever viruses repacker is interested in adding (and given the particular one is likely Russian, I do have my reservations at this crazy time...), etc.
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Joking aside, when you download an update, many times it is completely replacing chunks of the game, not just a couple lines of code.
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I mean, I understand when they chuck everything into a single file, but they used to know how to make their updaters unpack and replace only the stuff that needed updating, instead of just throwing the whole fucking file at you, redundancy be damned.
For instance, stuff in Quake 3 engine is kept in .pk3 files. You don't need to download the full, newest .pk3, you send a command to remove/replace files X, Y and Z within it and call it a day.
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For modern games, from what I've seen, they've taken a more modular approach to how assets are saved. So you'll have large data files which are essentially full of compressed textures or something. Depending on how many textures you're using and how many versions of each textures is available (for different detail levels), it can be a lot of assets, even if all the assets in this file, are all wall textures, as an example.
So the problem becomes that the updaters/installers are not complex enough to update a single texture file in a single compressed texture dataset file. So the solution is to instead, replace the entire dataset with one that contains the new information. So while you're adding an item or changing how something looks, you're basically sending not only the item, but also all similar items (all in the same set) again, even though 90% didn't change. The files can easily reach into the 10s of gigabytes in size due to how many assets are needed. Adding a map? Dataset file for all maps needs to be sent. Adding a weapon or changing the look/feel/animation of a weapon? Here's the entire weapon dataset again.
Though not nearly as horrible, the same can be said for the libraries and executable binaries of the game logic. This variable was added, well, here's that entire binary file with the change (not just the change). Binaries tend to be a lot smaller than the assets so it's less problematic.
The entirety of the game content is likely stored in a handful (maybe a few dozen at most) dataset files, so if any one of them change for any reason, end users now need to download 5-10% of the installed size of the game, to get the update.
Is there a better way? Probably. But it may be too complex to accomplish. Basically write a small patching program to unpack the dataset, replace/insert the new assets, then repack it. It would reduce the download size, but increase the amount of work the end user system needs to do for the update, which may or may not be viable depending on the system you've made the game for. PC games should support it, but what happens if you're coding across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo switch? Do those consoles allow your game the read/write access they need to the storage to do the unpacking and repacking? Do they have the space for that?
It becomes a risk, and doing it the way they are now, if you have enough room to download the update, then no more space is needed, since the update manager will simply copy the updated dataset entirely, over the old one.
It's a game of choices and variables, risks and rewards. Developers definitely don't want to get into the business of custom updates per platform based on capabilities, so you have to find a solution that works for everyone who might be running the game. The current solution wastes bandwidth, but has the merit of being cross compatible, and consistent. The process is the same for every platform.
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The console argument does actually make a lot of sense to me, thank you for the detailed response. It would still (seemingly) be possible to structure the project in a way that would allow replacing only what you actually need to replace, but that requires more investment in the architecture and likely cause more errors due to added complexity. Still, i cannot forgive the BG 3 coders for making me redownload these 120gb or so! )
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I've got 2gig fiber, not 56k dialup. It's Steam's bandwidth now. They paid Valve their 30%. Why bother with insane compression that just makes it feel slow for us?
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That is also a factor I do not understand. Bandwidth costs the storefront money, would Steam and others not want to decrease this load? And well done you with that fiber, you dog! I also have a fiber line but see no reason to upgrade from my tariff (150mib, i think?) that covers everything just to shave that hour of download time a year.
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games made with agile teams and with passions are probably good, regardless of when they were made. i'm young but growing up i only had access to really old computers and saw that most of the stuff that was made back in the day was just garbage shovelware. it was hard not to get buried in them.
most triple A developers today are far more skilled in both writing and optimizing the code however when the management is forcing you to work long hours you're gonna make more mistakes and with tight deadlines, if you're doing testing and bug fixing after developing the entire game then it's going to be the first thing that's getting cut.
that being said i wish they really did something about the massive size games take on disk. my screen is 1080p, my hardware can barely handle your game on low in 1080p so everything is gonna get downscaled regardless and despite how hard you wanna ignore it data caps are still here, why am i forced to get all assets and textures in 4k 8k? make it optional goddamit.
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AAA games are turning into luxury/super cars. At the top end, they're just not made for average consumers anymore where you need money for infrastructure to even drive the thing. But then you also have plenty of Indie/AA studios creating games that surpass AAA from 10-15 years ago with much smaller teams cause tools and skills make it feasible. Of course there's also the starcrafts and the counterstrikes that are over 20 years old and will never die, the Toyota Camrys and Honda Civics of games, they just get perpetually refreshed
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Nothing says fun like trying to relax and play a game . Oh no you need an update to the game...Oh did I say game I mean the custom launcher...here is our ads for our other games to click through...oh you must want to go to a webpage...whoops can't connect to online even if you don't want to play online...Ok you finally connected oh but the settings have been reset because of the update...Oh wait the cloud sync didn't work...
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And when you finally get the game to run, it needs to compile shaders. Then it need to download another update, from inside the game (and sometimes even restart the game.. Looking at you, MW2! ) And the user agreement have changed so you are forced to scroll to the bottom of one or more LONG legal text before you can click "Accept". And then a season intro cutscene (fortnite and CoD games does that). Then maybe a "Whats new" screen...
I remember Commodore 64 games could take up to 30 minutes to load. But at least I could just go make some food while waiting. Didn't have to sit there and press buttons.
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That last one really got me though hahaha
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I think in the past the actual devs were more accessible, and their skills visible and admirable. Kind of like how video games themselves were more of a techy nerdy thing.
Today you have humongous teams with the work spread over hundreds of people. We hear from their community managers and marketing teams rather than reading the coders’ opinions. And just like the big games are more of a safe corporate product, they are more mainstream.
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I love when gamers hyperfixation only on the bad examples while ignoring the existence of game companies that still do good work. Why elevate the ones doing things right when we can give all our attention to the ones doing things wrong?
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I mean this is comparing modern AAA game devs with what would have been considered AAA at the time. I think it's a fair comparison in that regard, but by manpower, 90's ID might be more similar to today's New Blood.
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Wild Hearts ran like ass using low preset on my same PC that ran both monster hunter world and rise just fine at 60fps high.
A CPU upgrade is my next target, but I didn't think it would get this bad in less than 5 years.
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There used to be a time when game devs wrote their masterpieces using assembly. Now it's all crap Unreal Engine
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Whats wrong with Unreal engine? 🤔
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Most devs either don't or can't bother with proper optimization. It's a problem as old as Unreal Engine 3, at least, I remember Unreal Tournament 3 running butter smooth on relatively weak computers, while other games made with UE3 would be choppy and laggy on the same rigs, despite having less graphical clutter.
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I could write a whole essay on whats wrong with UE from a players perspective. But here's the skinny.
\ Light Bloom, Distance Haze, TAA and Upscaling, no visual clarity, Roboto Font for 90% of all UIs, lower framerate for distant objects, no performance diffrence between highest and lowest graphical settings.
\ The only good looking and optimized UE games come from Epic themselves, so basically just Fortnite (RIP Paragon). Most of the games released by third parties are Primo Garbagio. They run like ass and look like ass.
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Man, I miss the good old days.
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Brian Provinciano made retro city rampage, then, crammed it into an NES cart. I don't think this argument is really valid.
Also, really, the breast milk bit? we don't want to work with females? what is that shit.
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I think it is more about the harassment allegations.
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We are women. Not "females".
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Totally, that's what I'm trying to lampoon, sorry if the sarcasm didn't come through on that aspect. I maintain my premise, there's a tremendous amount of harassment devs put up with for the 'privilege' of working in the games industry, a key aspect that makes me support unions and worker organization.
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That incident happened in Activision Blizzard. One of the terrible harassments women had to suffer there.
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Shut your mouth and hand over your milk.
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I mostly play old games that were made before the industry went to shit. There are a few new gems every year though.
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Game developers then
Triple A Game developers now
So it's outright admitting the comparison is nonsense?
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No, because Rollercoaster tychoon and sharewere were AAA games back in the day.
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Lol this is so stupid. All of these examples are interchangeable between "then" and "now".
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Where's the shareware from now? Where's the always online single player games from then?
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DRM is nothing new, we just used to have to keep up with the disk or a Key. If always online was an option back then you can bet your ass game publishers would have implemented it.
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This is referring to a real event: https://www.thegamer.com/activision-blizzard-breast-milk-stolen/
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This is very meta.
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