Simple Optimization Trick
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Rollercoaster Tycoon was the last of an era, not a sudden burst of genius.
Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly. Doom was a shock to the industry. You could now write a high performance, multiplatform, sophisticated game in a compiled language (C). When I say multiplatform, I don't just mean how it was ported to everything later. It was developed on NextStations first. DOS was the first port. So it proved all of the above immediately on release.
We take for granted that C is performant now, but that wasn't obvious until optimizing compilers got good and someone tried.
Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999) is the last notable title that used ASM. It's impressive in many ways, but it wasn't as much of a standout as it seems now. Six years earlier to its release, that was just how games were done.
It's notable that the only port of Rollercoaster Tycoon was the original Xbox, which was also x86. Nobody wants to rewrite it for anything else.
Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly.
Carmack wrote Wolfenstein 3d in C. Star Control and Dune 2 were C.
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And most startlingly: no git
Edit: y'all're right, version control is for wimps. What's life without some adrenaline?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Who needs git when you have a B: drive and a Save As command for tycoon43.asm
Version control? You mean this?
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Here's a neat video about the creator and the game - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JouTsMQsEA
I will never not upvote an Ahoy video. The guy is a legend in video game documentaries. Check out his Monkey Island video as a follow-up
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I've never written a single line of code in assembly, and I'm now curious
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"Try writing it it in assembly"
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Just to throw on more factoids:
Wasn't Gabe Newell either the first, or among the first, to port Doom to Win 95?
He was an analyst at Microsoft who was tasked with finding out how many computers ran Windows to determine market share. Part of the question involved asking what other software was installed and the only software used more than Windows was Doom. This made GabeN realize the market potential of games and he left Microsoft shortly afterward.
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TTD and RCT are still amazing.
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He was an analyst at Microsoft who was tasked with finding out how many computers ran Windows to determine market share. Part of the question involved asking what other software was installed and the only software used more than Windows was Doom. This made GabeN realize the market potential of games and he left Microsoft shortly afterward.
See, I've heard that story, that he basically ran ... well, arguably, a worm that did network analysis on what was installed on every computer in the MSFT internal network, realized more people had DOOM installed... than Windows...
... and I have also heard that he actually ported DOOM to... either MS DOS, or Win95... ?
I genuienly do not know which is true, if they're all true, if they're all false... I can't remember the source for each of these, but I know I've heard or read all these semi-close variants from somewhere, over the years.
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I will never not upvote an Ahoy video. The guy is a legend in video game documentaries. Check out his Monkey Island video as a follow-up
Another really good one that I've watched at least 4 times is his Polybius video. He's an incredible documentarian and an equally great researcher.
I'm sure some of the Polybius one was dramatized a little (apart from what was clearly labeled as actors reading the transcripts), but it makes for an unforgettable watch. And the music!!
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Epic Pinball was another game that I recall was written in assembly. When your old 286 struggled to run games at a decent framerate, Epic Pinball would run in a smooth 75fps or whatever you set your CRT monitor to.
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Epic Pinball was another game that I recall was written in assembly. When your old 286 struggled to run games at a decent framerate, Epic Pinball would run in a smooth 75fps or whatever you set your CRT monitor to.
Epic Pinball, if I recall correctly, also used some ModeX trickery, meaning it had most of the pinball table in VRAM, and then modified the VGA framebuffer pointer for scrolling, then only moving as much data as it was needed (ball, flippers, etc)
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And most startlingly: no git
Edit: y'all're right, version control is for wimps. What's life without some adrenaline?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]./src ./src_1998_11_05_added_people_swimming ./src_1998_11_06_added_death_mechanics ./src_1998_11_06_0_removed_swimming_lol -
And most startlingly: no git
Edit: y'all're right, version control is for wimps. What's life without some adrenaline?
Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.
Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!
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You couldn't pay me to write a game in C today. Our expectations of what games have to be are sky high today. You cant get away with the productivity lost writing in c, maybe c++ since its supported by a number of engines. But, im personally not aware of a single engine that uses C. I tried my hand at writing a game without an engine, and it was a hot mess. Writing low level code to make a button with text, no thanks...been there done that, in my game, you could bump into trees and get stuck...not very fun in my opinion, and thats after a few months of writing code.
Animal Well was written in C without an engine and it was a decent hit (for an indie). Although that's definitely an exception, perhaps very similar to the RollerCoaster Tycoon example
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Animal Well was written in C without an engine and it was a decent hit (for an indie). Although that's definitely an exception, perhaps very similar to the RollerCoaster Tycoon example
Animal Well
Animal Well was the shit.
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See, I've heard that story, that he basically ran ... well, arguably, a worm that did network analysis on what was installed on every computer in the MSFT internal network, realized more people had DOOM installed... than Windows...
... and I have also heard that he actually ported DOOM to... either MS DOS, or Win95... ?
I genuienly do not know which is true, if they're all true, if they're all false... I can't remember the source for each of these, but I know I've heard or read all these semi-close variants from somewhere, over the years.
Just saw this article recently. Gabe was part of a team trying to convince developers that they would be better off writing their games with more abstracted code/libraries instead of writing their own interfaces (some of which were written by people convinced they were being really efficient but were actually terrible). One thing they did to prove their point was going to id and offering to have Microsoft port Doom to Windows for free. But the experience and seeing the success id was having distributing their own game led Gabe to launch Valve.
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I've never written a single line of code in assembly, and I'm now curious
Really? It was required when I was in college. We did MIPS, x86, and PIC.
I like it because there's no mysterious things happening to your bits. Every line is an instruction executed. You control the machine. It's power. It gives you power over the machines.
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Rollercoaster Tycoon was the last of an era, not a sudden burst of genius.
Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly. Doom was a shock to the industry. You could now write a high performance, multiplatform, sophisticated game in a compiled language (C). When I say multiplatform, I don't just mean how it was ported to everything later. It was developed on NextStations first. DOS was the first port. So it proved all of the above immediately on release.
We take for granted that C is performant now, but that wasn't obvious until optimizing compilers got good and someone tried.
Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999) is the last notable title that used ASM. It's impressive in many ways, but it wasn't as much of a standout as it seems now. Six years earlier to its release, that was just how games were done.
It's notable that the only port of Rollercoaster Tycoon was the original Xbox, which was also x86. Nobody wants to rewrite it for anything else.
Eventually it sort-of got a rewrite to create RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, initially for iOS and Android, later for Windows, macOS, and Nintendo Switch. It largely is a rewrite of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, with the goal of bringing the game to more modern platforms, and the save files for parks and rides are compatible. In this interview with Atari Club, Sawyer says the rewrite was in C++ but even with a team of people still took longer to write in C++ than it took him to write the original in x86 assembly.
If anyone previously paid attention to RCT Classic, it’s been seeing some development work again and is working on Android again. They also made RCT Classic+ on Apple Arcade (basically just the game and all the expansions included) and also updated the regular versions of RCT Classic so they run correctly again (RCT Classic stopped working on macOS when Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications and Atari didn’t release a recompiled game until recently).
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Really? It was required when I was in college. We did MIPS, x86, and PIC.
I like it because there's no mysterious things happening to your bits. Every line is an instruction executed. You control the machine. It's power. It gives you power over the machines.
I went to college for Microbiology and became a programmer on my own after, so nope, never written a single line in assembly and never thought of checking it out either. Just never really crossed my mind. I might start messing with it soon.
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Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly.
Carmack wrote Wolfenstein 3d in C. Star Control and Dune 2 were C.
> almost
