Simple Optimization Trick
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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
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is there a NPM package for assembly? I need to keep access to right pad my strings package.
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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!
In my experience (some games in z80 and 68000 in the early 90s), version control wasn't considered until mid-90s sometime, and at first wasn't trusted. There were network backups, but I don't know if they had revisions.
Merging seemed like it couldn't possibly work well, so we would try to have separate ownership of different files. Although there would be only a handful of programmers on a team, so that was easy.
Prior to that, backup and versioning was manually handing a floppy or two to someone each week.
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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.
That wasn't required in my CS program, though instead we had to design our own instruction set and assembler. Obviously it was an approximation, though.
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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.
Wolfenstein 3D is a lot less impressive than Doom. Doom was faster and more complex than other games, where as Wolfenstein had a strong and appealing gimmick but was slower and less complex as a trade-off. In-line with the expectations around compiled languages.
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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
No? Not even close? Why is it people get away with saying such stupid things on the internet?
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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.
I... Don't recommend it. Rust if anything.
It's a neat party trick? Helps you understand how a processor works? But for anything modern, it's way more work than it's worth.
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Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly
No? Not even close? Why is it people get away with saying such stupid things on the internet?
Because it's true. Here's an article from Tim Sweeney from 2001:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010105180900/http://www.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/devweek_c.shtm
Mainstream application programmers switched to C in the early 80's. Game developers were slower to switch, because their small teams and focus on performance kept assembly language viable till the following decade. When id Software released DOOM, they surprised much of the industry by having no reliance on assembly code--despite excellent game performance, and by successfully cross-developing the game (in NeXTstep and DOS), then successfully porting it to an astounding variety of platforms.
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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.
Those games didn't have the splash that Doom did for this sort of thing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010105180900/http://www.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/devweek_c.shtm
Mainstream application programmers switched to C in the early 80's. Game developers were slower to switch, because their small teams and focus on performance kept assembly language viable till the following decade. When id Software released DOOM, they surprised much of the industry by having no reliance on assembly code--despite excellent game performance, and by successfully cross-developing the game (in NeXTstep and DOS), then successfully porting it to an astounding variety of platforms.
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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
Wikipedia says cpp
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This looks like a screenshot in the background of the C++ OpenRCT version because the resolution is too high and not supported by the original assembly release.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The original goes to 1024 x 786 and has different zoom levels. I've played most of the original parks this year and that does not see to be too high res to me. Give me a sec I'll take a screenshot of mine in a minute.
Edit here it is. It's the GOG version, which launches fullscreen, so the 1024 x 768 are stretched onto the center of my 1920 x 1080 screen.
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Hello everyone and welcome to another video.
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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.
If you're curious, I recommend this channel. It often delves deep into the code to explain stuff, as well as how the hardware works. Really fascinating!
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Because it's true. Here's an article from Tim Sweeney from 2001:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010105180900/http://www.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/devweek_c.shtm
Mainstream application programmers switched to C in the early 80's. Game developers were slower to switch, because their small teams and focus on performance kept assembly language viable till the following decade. When id Software released DOOM, they surprised much of the industry by having no reliance on assembly code--despite excellent game performance, and by successfully cross-developing the game (in NeXTstep and DOS), then successfully porting it to an astounding variety of platforms.
Focus on performance, wow, well the industry has certainly changed a bit.
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I've never written a single line of code in assembly, and I'm now curious
I learned z80 assembly back when the cutting edge of technology was a ZX Spectrum, and 68k assembly when I upgraded to an Amiga. That knowledge served me quite well for my early career in industrial automation - it was hard real-time coding on eZ80's and 65c02 processors, but the knowledge transfers.
Back in the day, when input got mapped straight into a memory location and the display output was another memory location, then assembly seems like magic. Read the byte they corresponds to the right-hand middle row of the keyboard, check if a certain bit is set in that byte, therefore a key is held down. Call your subroutine that copies a sequence of bytes into a known location. Boom, pressing a key updates the screen. Awesome.
Modern assembly (x64 and the like) has masses of rules about pointer alignment for the stacks, which you do so often you might as well write a macro for it. Since the OS doesn't let you write system memory any more (a good thing) then you need to make system calls and call library functions to do the same thing. You do that so often that you might as well write a macro for that as well. Boom, now your assembly looks almost exactly like C. Might as well learn that instead.
In fact, that's almost the purpose of C - a more readable, somewhat portable assembly language. Experienced C developers will know which sequence of opcodes they'd expect from any language construction. It's quite a simple mapping in that regard.
It's handy to know a little assembly occasionally, but unless you're writing eg. crypto implementations, which must take the exact same time and power to execute regardless of the input, then it's impractical for almost any purpose nowadays.
