games better if coded like in the 80's 90's ?

[Jgames]

You can do software rendering without DirectX and OpenGL, but it will be slow, maybe buggy, and not look as good. (and take a lot of time to develop)
But, for an education point of view, knowing how to do 3D software rendering and do some program/demo to understand it is very important. Then one can move to DirectX or other library.

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by wilshy

If a game is good, a game is good.

Exactly.

I never give any thought to how a game is coded. Who cares? It seems a fairly irrelevant question to me.

[Zetr0]

ahhh but guys.... you can have a good game thats buggy....

for my point -

When "X-COM: UFO Enemy Uknown" was relased for the PSx it shipped with huge memory leak hole and will constantly (and persistenly) crash after every 6th move when in a UFO mission on the largest UFO with your guys at the highest *height [lv4]* in the game.

you can try this at home, most of the time this is an unknown bug, unless that is your tactic to taking down the largest UFO by blaster-launching into the command center and working your way down (when the leader is killed / stunned all other enemy suffer MASSIVE moral loss - easy pickin's partner!)

Anyway... this fault is even prevailent when using my PSP playing the PSx version of XCOM - I even tried the US release.... same problem..

so... does this bug make it a bad game.... no... but it does mean it could be better - a lot better, the irony here is that there is NO API for the PSx other than a remedial SDK

so one could say that - because there no API this game is the worse for it? but personally I would say its just sloppy code - or better yet... a minor slip up.... or poor product testing... lol

(one day imma gonna team up with some crazy coder/artist and we shall program a PSx game =D.... one day....)

Anyway... whistfull thoughts aside... this error is NOT in XCOM: Terror from the Deep.

Personally I love the PSx version, its relatively quick in both loading / and turn-taking but its bigest WIN for me is the music score.... its fantastic!

I even put this on in the back ground when I play the Amiga/PC version of the game.

However the game has its drawback... memory card saving is limmited to one save per card and it takes forever - this has been known to crash as well at this point.


so a great game... that sadly in places poorly written.

doesn't stop me liking it though =D

[deicidal]

The original Halflife was like that, constanlty getting stuck in lifts and cables just vanishing!

[TCD]

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=54410
Still don't see how the way games are coded makes a difference. They were (nearly) as faulty/great/boring/samey back then. Agree on there being less experiments, but that's not the question.

[Bronko]

Smaller teams, or even just one individual can form a game much deeper, than those huge development teams, which are sadly needed for today's complex games. That's why indie games are so highly enjoyable.
And back in the days, games which require hundreds of developers, weren't possible due to hardware restrictions.

[Paul_s]

The thing is... in the old days there was a lot more freedom in the way individuals/groups/companies went about producing games. There was also a wider market in terms of PD releases imo.

A lot of games produced these days are market driven and creativity has suffered. Sure, games may look pretty but that's the thing, they look too polished, 80's/90's games are like analogue whereas everything these days is plain cut digital...

If anyone knows what I'm going on about please press 1, otherwise please hang up the phone.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by turrican3

I just want to know if you think we could have better games if they was programmed like in the 80's or 90's without directx or opengl or things like that ??????

Ironically, the way the Amiga OS was originally designed was probably the inspiration for a lot of what people use today.

The Amiga libraries were there in part to take care of a lot of things, but because of the nature of their speed (or lack of), it was easier and the games ran quicker by avoiding them altogether.

[turrican3]

happy about your answers, but i think about special affects in games, i mean you know the skill of the coders pushed the amiga to a level we never imagine in the beginning i think about brian the lion, flink, unreal, turrican 2 and many more ... But now that make a long time than i don't say myself : whaoo look this new effect or this trick. i feel like games are all the same and i thought myself it's because they use all d3d etc -> less difference between games, i mean grafically .... Perhaps it's because i play less, i don't know.

[Jonathan Drain]

It used to take four men working in a basement for a year to produce a top-class Amiga game. Now, you need sixty experienced professionals to get the maximum out of modern game hardware. With that sort of money involved, publishers can't afford to take risks, so games are more samey.

[Npl]

Originally Posted by turrican3

happy about your answers, but i think about special affects in games, i mean you know the skill of the coders pushed the amiga to a level we never imagine in the beginning i think about brian the lion, flink, unreal, turrican 2 and many more ... But now that make a long time than i don't say myself : whaoo look this new effect or this trick. i feel like games are all the same and i thought myself it's because they use all d3d etc -> less difference between games, i mean grafically .... Perhaps it's because i play less, i don't know.

Then just look at the consoles, devs did insane things with PS2 games like "Silent Hill 3", "Zone of the Enders 2" or "Burnout 3". Stuff you wouldnt expect 2000`s hardware to do.
Developing for console is quite similar to the Amiga-times in the respect that you have a static target and can really exploit the hardware. APIs exist but are way more lightweight than the ones on PC.

I think the effect you describe is probably the "mainstream" direction thats unfortunately taken by most developers. you get dozens of similar looking FPS`s cause thats where the trend and biggest market lies. Its by choice and not by technical issues.

[andreas]

Originally Posted by turrican3

I just want to know if you think we could have better games if they was programmed like in the 80's or 90's without directx or opengl or things like that ??????

if it's about "better games in respect to much more blood, sweat and tears put into" then it's a clear YES.

These days, who'd ever "waste" his time in pushing the hardware to its limits?
(like "Mayhem in Monsterland" on the C64? Just INCREDIBLE!)

Nowadays you have a hardware powerful enough to "only" use it up at 60%, and still have decent results!
Thing is: if you have hardware limits, you want to push the machine as far as humanly possible.
But if you don't, you just recycle old engines (like that of Q2/Q3, Doom, or Half-Life or whatever else), making them better and better, layer something on top of it ... but it will always stay a COPY, a DERIVATIVE. The core is just not yours, and it'll never be.

Teams have visibly stopped making something actually from scratch, from the first line of code. They've got a plethora of engines as well as toolboxes, frameworks and whatnot to choose from / to work with so they just have to reproduce instead of produce.
In C64 and Amiga floppy disk times, teams hired ONE PERSON just for the packing routine, to make the thing smaller, if not loading faster. Often a mathematician (!) specialized in LZ77 inner workings. Wow!
Today? You have almost 10 GIGABYTES on a double-layer DVD, so who'd be interested about packing?

If one is on his high horse once (huge amounts of older, available data to piece together something new, some of which even are from public libraries), REAL innovation will decrease gradually. That's a fact.
It's like hip-hop guys piecing together cutouts from old Isaac Hayes records. OK it'll be a new song, but with lots of Hayes' great work in. So it can never be called 100% original. It will always stay a COPY, too. A DERIVED work. The "engine" in the videogame here corresponds to the original 1970's LP.
There it is again: the 'innovation' aspect.
Of course, if you discuss with a hip-hop producer, he'll call that "take sample from ancient LP and put something around it" technique "innovation" as well.
I won't.

[LocalH]

Originally Posted by andreas

Teams have visibly stopped making something actually from scratch, from the first line of code. They've got a plethora of engines as well as toolboxes, frameworks and whatnot to choose from / to work with so they just have to reproduce instead of produce.

That's not 100% true across the board, although I agree it's highly prevalent. For instance, except for the lowlevel libraries provided by the console manufacturers, the guys at Harmonix (Guitar Hero 1/2/80s, Rock Band series) developed their engine from scratch, using no existing engine as a base.

[gilgamesh]

Originally Posted by turrican3

I just want to know if you think we could have better games if they was programmed like in the 80's or 90's without directx or opengl or things like that ??????

If so Monkey Island would be worse if you played it in ScummVM.

I think it is like watching old black and white movies. They often have an authenticity that modern films lack. But that's not technical.

[Franko]

I personally think games back in the 80s & 90s had the most important factor in them ie:- Gameplay, don't get me wrong their was plenty of crap games back then too.

But when I look at the obsession folk have with todays 3D/first perspective style games and the fact that they all look the same and play the same, I just wonder what enjoyment folk actually get from these games.

I reckon for gameplay and depth, then (dare I say it here) the SNES RPG style games would have to be some of the best games ever written for any machine in terms of gameplay, enjoyment and value for money. (even if I do have to pay up to 100 quid for some of them on ebay...)

[desiv]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Is that due to how they are coded?

Actually, it might be, a bit...

I don't know this, but I would assume that the SDKs for the newer systems are designed with 3D in mind...

I can imagine MS and Sony and Nintendo, as they are developing these SDKs, making sure that the 3D programming is very well supported...
Where as the 2D might not have as much support... I mean, there are almost no 2D games, so why bother???

I would think that it's possible (likely?) that the creative 2D games might have had to work around the SDKs a bit to get what they want...

Not sure, but it's possible..

desiv

[TCD]

Originally Posted by desiv

I would think that it's possible (likely?) that the creative 2D games might have had to work around the SDKs a bit to get what they want...

Not sure what you mean by 'work around', as it would simply mean not to use a 3D SDK/API. Even if it's not done that much anymore, I don't think there's actually something 'blocking' you from coding decent 2D games nowadays. Still, does it make a game 'better' if it uses 2D instead of 3D?

[gilgamesh]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Still, does it make a game 'better' if it uses 2D instead of 3D?

I think that depends: Some genres just lend themselves to one or the other. There are good 3D adventures for example (Grim Fandango). But I think that's an exception. Point&Click is a 2D genre.

[TCD]

Broken Sword 4 is also very playable in 3D. Agree that there are many examples of it done wrong, but that's mainly because they didn't try hard enough ([tm] Bart Simpson) IMO

[desiv]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Not sure what you mean by 'work around', as it would simply mean not to use a 3D SDK/API.

I just mean, assuming (and as I said, I don't know this) that the 2D API isn't fully fleshed out and they had to write their own routines for things like collision detection or ???

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Even if it's not done that much anymore, I don't think there's actually something 'blocking' you from coding decent 2D games nowadays. Still, does it make a game 'better' if it uses 2D instead of 3D?

I think that depends on that game...

desiv