🚀 go-pugleaf

sum...@mediaone.net wrote:

>Scott, I think you're not getting the main focus of the post.  In

The main focus of the post was that "PC game developers are sloppy,
period", and Scott replied to that.

>early computer gaming, machines were pretty static, as opposed to
>being almost obsolete withing 12 months.  I once made a personal rule

Yes, but this in no way is the same thing as being sloppy when
programming a game. Even a game with VERY tight code can need lots of
horsepower, simply if it does so much more.

>in CPU power.  Ulitma 2, 3, and 4 were all designed to run on the same
>machine, yet U3 covered 20 times the space of U2, and U4 covered 20
>times the span of U3.

I recall playing Ultima 1, 2 and 3 on one of those original PC
machines back in the early eighties. Ultima 3 was much slower on it
than either of the previous Ultimas.

>familarity-meaning increased proficiency.  At the time it came out,
>Doom was a marvel of technology because it gave a framerate no other
>program could match, AT THAT LEVEL OF TECHNOLOGY.  If you examine

In case you don't remember, Doom was one of those games that made
people buy new hardware for it. Most gaming PCs were still 386 or very
lowest end 486sx machines with 4MB RAM back then, and lots of people
upgraded for faster 486/66 machines and upgraded their RAM to 8MB
mainly because of Doom. Doom was very stuttery on 4MB machines.

So I would say you picked a bad example. ;^)

>that the over-hyped game you brought home runs like frozen tar even
>tho your machine is over the minimum requirements.  If you did the

In that case you must ask yourself: did I try to run it with maximum
detail levels even though my machine just barely exceeded the minimum
requirements?

>it better now than then.  Going back to Doom, this game was as much an
>advance in coding efficiency as game design.

Yes, but it still really needed more RAM and a faster PC than most PC
gamers had back then. And frankly, I regarded Ultima Underworld as a
bigger breakthrough in game design than Doom. Heck, UUW came out the
same time as _Wolfenstein3D_ (much before Doom that is), yet it had
many features in its 3D engine that missed even from Doom, like
ability to create bridges (ie. a character could be above another one,
not possible in Doom), there were slopes, you could look up and down,
you could jump, you could swim etc.

>the same you'd be seeing a lot fewer first person shooters but program
>quality would still have advanced(albeit slower).   You'll have to
>admit that as long as programmers EXPECT/RELY ON technology increases,
>there's no real pressure to tighten the code(and I mean find something
>really revolutionary that surpases all previous records at the same
>technology).

"Finding really revolutionary ways that surpases all previous records
at the same technology" is possible only when the technology is
relatively new, which is the case with e.g. consoles, but generally
speaking not with PCs. x86 coding has been around for more than a
decade, even though there has been some advances during that time like
386s. For example, how is it different to optimize code for a 60MHz
Pentium machine than a 200MHz Pentium? Another thing: should you
really optimize a game so hard for a Pentium2 machine that the game
would not run on e.g. AMD K6-2 processors anymore because it relied on
Intel P2 so much? Would that serve our best interests as PC gamers?

The reason you can see so big advances in e.g. console games is simply
because when the console is new, the game programmers are doing very
poor job, not because they are lazy, but because they are not familiar
with the hardware at all (as it is so new technology). Later they
learn more about the machine and see the trivial errors they made
earlier that made their game run 50% slower than it would have run
otherwise.

What you seem to be saying is that all PC game developers are still
using the PC as poorly as it was completely new and unfamiliar
technology to them. I say: bs.


Someone took as an example that Sinclair Spectrum game which was
something like 50% bigger than the previous game in the series even
though it run on the same machine. And this was due to the
optimizations the programmer made.

Now, if he would have made another game in the series, would it have
been another 50% bigger on the same machine? And another, would that
also been even 50% bigger? No limit whatsoever?

IMHO that's basically what you are asking PC game developers to do:
many of them may already be banging the limits of current PCs as much
as it is possible and feasible (for example not breaking the
compatibility with non-Intel processors), but you just say they must
be doing sloppy job because Unreal doesn't run on 486 machines with
full detail settings.


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