How to spawn two ships?

[Grimbli]

Hehe....Maynard has 16-bits.

hehe....maynard

it's not how many bits you have

it's what you do with them

heh heh

Strange tangent, but I was once watching a documentary about programmers from the 8/16 bit era and they were talking about how they had to do all sorts of crazy things with code to fit their games onto those roms. And how once they got really good at it they could fake things to make it look even better and have more gameplay. It was pretty interesting. It explains why later era Nintendo games look so much better and almost seem like a different generation of system than the very first and basic games.

How it almost makes programmers of today seem lazy by comparison since they're not constrained by file size when you can have games that are 50+ GB.

 

[Cugino83]

....
How it almost makes programmers of today seem lazy by comparison since they're not constrained by file size when you can have games that are 50+ GB.

It's not a matter of lazyness, is a matter of costs: optimization take time and affort and that means costo to a company. in the past that wasn't an options, if you didn0t do that you ware not able to go on the market, right now, you can totally skip this or heavily reduce it since the hardware capability are far far more superior... that of course could mean that company can use this "extra time" to add more features, better graphics effect and more details... or simply cheap out and deliver a poorly optimized game... sadly in most of the case is the second options....

In most case you'll see this optimization process in the later games of a console generation, where company try to sqeeze more performance form an old hardware, in that cases they fall back to the original work metod: "optimise it or you're out of business" and of course the second option is not a options...

 

[maynard]

back in the day IBM engineers believed a personal computer would never need more than 640 Kb of memory so the original IBM PC had that limitation hard-wired into it. From 1981 until the introduction of Windows 95 programmers had to jump through hoops to access usable amounts of memory. Some of the workarounds were pure genius.

I remember finding a copy of Microsoft Word 1.0 at a swap meet in 1993 - it fit on a single 1.2 Mb floppy disk. My first Wing Commander (v.2.0 IIRC) fit on one disk also. It was optimized for a 25Mhz 386 PC. I ran a 16Mhz machine with a whopping 4Mb of memory and a 320x480 monochrome graphics card and thought I had a hot shit setup ...

 

[Grimbli]

It's not a matter of lazyness, is a matter of costs: optimization take time and affort and that means costo to a company. in the past that wasn't an options, if you didn0t do that you ware not able to go on the market, right now, you can totally skip this or heavily reduce it since the hardware capability are far far more superior... that of course could mean that company can use this "extra time" to add more features, better graphics effect and more details... or simply cheap out and deliver a poorly optimized game... sadly in most of the case is the second options....

In most case you'll see this optimization process in the later games of a console generation, where company try to sqeeze more performance form an old hardware, in that cases they fall back to the original work metod: "optimise it or you're out of business" and of course the second option is not a options...

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to imply they were actually lazy, I know they have a whole other set of work and challenges. But it's funny to think of some "old timer" programmer being like, "You call that code?! We had to fit three hundred levels on a 5 and 1/4 floppy!"