Gaming Tech Talk

solidus

How Crash Bandicoot was fit into 2mb of RAM

Here's a related anecdote from the late 1990s. I was one of the two programers (along with Andy Gavin) who wrote Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation 1.

RAM was still a major issue even then. The PS1 had 2MB of RAM, and we had to do crazy things to get the game to fit. We had levels with over 10MB of data in them, and this had to be paged in and out dynamically, without any "hitches"—loading lags where the frame rate would drop below 30 Hz.

It mainly worked because Andy wrote an incredible paging system that would swap in and out 64K data pages as Crash traversed the level. This was a "full stack" tour de force, in that it ran the gamut from high-level memory management to opcode-level DMA coding. Andy even controlled the physical layout of bytes on the CD-ROM disk so that—even at 300KB/sec—the PS1 could load the data for each piece of a given level by the time Crash ended up there.

I wrote the packer tool that took the resources—sounds, art, lisp control code for critters, etc.—and packed them into 64K pages for Andy's system. (Incidentally, this problem—producing the ideal packing into fixed-sized pages of a set of arbitrarily-sized objects—is NP-complete, and therefore likely impossible to solve optimally in polynomial—i.e., reasonable—time.)

Some levels barely fit, and my packer used a variety of algorithms (first-fit, best-fit, etc.) to try to find the best packing, including a stochastic search akin to the gradient descent process used in Simulated annealing. Basically, I had a whole bunch of different packing strategies, and would try them all and use the best result.

The problem with using a random guided search like that, though, is that you never know if you're going to get the same result again. Some Crash levels fit into the maximum allowed number of pages (I think it was 21) only by virtue of the stochastic packer "getting lucky". This meant that once you had the level packed, you might change the code for a turtle and never be able to find a 21-page packing again. There were times when one of the artists would want to change something, and it would blow out the page count, and we'd have to change other stuff semi-randomly until the packer again found a packing that worked. Try explaining this to a crabby artist at 3 in the morning. :)

By far the best part in retrospect—and the worst part at the time—was getting the core C/assembly code to fit. We were literally days away from the drop-dead date for the "gold master"—our last chance to make the holiday season before we lost the entire year—and we were randomly permuting C code into semantically identical but syntactically different manifestations to get the compiler to produce code that was 200, 125, 50, then 8 bytes smaller. Permuting as in, "for (i=0; i < x; i++)"—what happens if we rewrite that as a while loop using a variable we already used above for something else? This was after we'd already exhausted the usual tricks of, e.g., stuffing data into the lower two bits of pointers (which only works because all addresses on the R3000 were 4-byte aligned).

Ultimately Crash fit into the PS1's memory with 4 bytes to spare. Yes, 4 bytes out of 2097152. Good times.

Solid_Snake

Kraljevi.

Jedino se KojiPro može mjeriti sa njima po dugoročnoj kvaliteti.

Solid_Snake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZFquhQiC88

Solid_Snake

Evo sjajan primjer razlike između Gears verzija

https://gearsofwar.com/en-us/ultimate-edition/before-and-after

viper89

Ti gearsi su bas bili bomba al bas prava bomba kad su izasli na 360.
Damn , kako se dobro drzi igra.

Solid_Snake

Ovo i Halo su bili system seller-i u svoje vrijeme.
Naravno i danas su, ali u puno manjoj količini. Trebaju im ekskluzive takvog kalibra.
Svaka čast za ReCore i Scalebound, ali to nažalost nisu ovakve "mainstream" igre (iako bih ja za Quantum Break i Scale. vjerovatno kupio konzolu).

Šteta stvarno za Epic, kakve je on igretine proizvodio ranije...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZgCmXfKi_M

gibanica

definitivno mi se vise svida ovo novo iako na nekim djelovima je previse svijetlo i nekako neunisteno
ali manje blooma i blura koji su u originalu bili prenapucani je definitivan +

a to za epic
premalo izdaju ali zato svi koriste njihov engine
tj koristili su, opet U4 je super engine ali zato svaka kompanija ima svoj interni engine, evo jako mala lista engina po izdavacu/developeru koju iz glave mogu napisat a da se trenutno aktivno koriste

ea ima cryengine i frostbite
ubi ima anvil next i snowdrop i duniu
squeenix ima luminous studio i dawn engine
konami ima foc engine iako neznam kako ce to ic sad i kome ce se to prodat
CDPR ima svoj red engine koji je jako dobar
fromsoft i njihov novi engine koji pogoni bloodborne i dark souls 3
deep silver ima 4A engine (metro 2033 i LL)
techland ima chrome 6
capcom ima panta rhei
rockstar ima svoj RAGE engine
bethesda ima creation, id tech 6 i void engine

sad naspram situacije gdje je unreal 3 bio koristen u 90% slucajeva situacija je drugacija jer danas svaki veci studio ima jedan ili vise dostupnih pokretaca
zato neznam kako ce im to proc ove generacije

chono7

Dva brata, lijevo 19Marksman89, desno ja. Zanemarite sitnu prašinu na ulazu, ne vidi se uživo

Solid_Snake

Buraz ti ima većeg

Nexus

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-22-fallout-4-will-run-at-1080p30-on-everything

Bethesda...

ivancro95

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-22-fallout-4-will-run-at-1080p30-on-everything

Bethesda...

cuz dem muney

chono7

Fallout 4 is 1080p & 30fps on Xbox One and PS4. Resolution and FPS are not limited in any way on the PC.

Bitan dio članka

gibanica

1080p?
pitam se kaj ce zrtvovat za to

Solid_Snake

Sramota za 2015-tu ovakav mali set opcija.
Također, masa ljudi se žali na neoptimiziranost i potražnje igre za Vram-om. Očekujem neizbježne patch-ove.
Na konzolama je sasvim ok situacija.

chono7

Koja je to igra Solid?

Solid_Snake

Batman ovaj novi.

chono7

Znaci jos jedan console port na pc u nizu...

Solid_Snake

Također ima onaj Denuvo DRM ako se ne varam, mah kad pogledam zadnji GTA V u pogledu opcija (pa i witcher zadnji sa obzirom kako izgleda) sve što nije takvo danas mi je loše.

Razumijem da ste indie studio, pa nemate love za neke ekscese i portanja, ali ovo je just lazy za ovakav tip AAA naslova.

Solid_Snake

We didn't get review code for Batman: Arkham Knight, and now we might know why. With today's release of the Rocksteady sequel, Steam has been flooded with negative reviews regarding the PC port's quality. It is, by all reports, not good.

Chief complaints include stuttering frame-rates and a 30 frames-per-second cap. This latter restriction can be removed by editing a config file. To do that, open your Arkham Knight install directory, and navigate to, "BmGameConfigBmSystemSettings.ini”.

In the config file, search for "Max_FPS=30", and change it to "Max_FPS=9999".

In addition, it sounds like even high-end graphics cards are struggling to maintain a stable frame-rate, despite new drivers from both Nvidia and AMD.

As for other potential fixes and tweaks, people who have installed the game to SSD's are apparently getting better performance. And, for those fed up of the long, unskippable opening splash screens, adding "–nologo" to "Set Launch Options" in the Steam Library properties menu will get rid of them.

http://www.pcgamer.com/batman-arkham-knights-launch-appears-to-be-a-disaster/

viper89

30 fps cap lol

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