Quote:
Originally Posted by OlafSch
it is nothing to say against using A500 as base. There are countless action games or platform games who look nice even today and were running on A500. The problem is you have to invest a lot of time in optimizations (you can correct me if I am wrong) expecially if you are normally doing games on and for other platforms. And the question is how many developers are today willing to do that. I think the low hardware was one of the reasons for the decline of the platform. So if we want to attract developers again the users should not insist on plain A500 as requirement. Novacoder shows with his ports what is possible with AGA when you have enough processing power so the trend goes to higher requirements and even most classic fans have at least 68030.
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This is why modern games suck so much juice! The programmers got lazy and didn't spend the time to optimize their code, "We'll just add more RAM" is frequently heard where I work. It's a crappy programmer that blames the hardware for his program being crap. I've always felt that's why 'PC' games were always so much larger in size than the Amiga/Atari versions, where they had to be optimized to fit. I do agree with it being one of the reasons the platform declined. Not so much that the systems couldn't handle them, but that more and more developers had to make compromises in their software (Ultima 6 is a perfect example, the DOS version is 4mb, whereas the Atari ST version was 2mb (not sure about the Amiga version, but it should be the same, since both were simply EGA ports, the only difference is the music).
Funny story, a marketing person where I work was complaining about SugarCRM being 'sluggish'. "It takes 1-2 seconds whenever you click on a new tab to load! We'd better add more ram to it!" I checked the memory, with Linux, Apache, MySQL and SugarCRM it was using around 700mb out of 4GB.... We nicknamed him "RAM-Man" since he always says this.
When I see contests like the 96k games (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger ) it just makes me think of all the waste that is done on the PC these days. Mobile devices sort of bring back the feeling of "Let's see what coders can do within the confines of these little things!" It's why the demoscene is still around. Sadly I show some of the demos to people now days (even the newer ones) and they just say "oh, that's kind of cool" and don't really appreciate that they are running on 7mhz machines with 1mb of ram.
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