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Re: Where's the Adventure?
[Re: Dan Silverman]
#176986
01/09/08 20:07
01/09/08 20:07
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 8,973
Bay Area
Doug
Senior Expert
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Senior Expert
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 8,973
Bay Area
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Ah, "The good old days."(tm)  In theory, anybody could make a successful game. But very few did. Most of the "indie" developers spent months working alone. They created everything themselves because they had to. They had dreams of making the next "Ultima", but most couldn't get past the stage of blitting sprites on a static background. The few that could get something playable finished had little to no chance of convincing a major publisher to look at it. Few self-published games got noticed. DOOM and Myst were the exception to the rules (the Unreal team was not an indie developer). I tried being an "indie" developer (a word not used at the time) in the 1990's. I'd much rather be an indie game developer today. 
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Re: Where's the Adventure?
[Re: Pappenheimer]
#176988
01/09/08 22:27
01/09/08 22:27
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Joined: May 2002
Posts: 7,441
ventilator
Senior Expert
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Senior Expert
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 7,441
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to me it sounds like you have some kind of a midlife crisis.  there are a lot of exciting and adventurous things happening now. people share more ideas and code than ever before. since the communities were smaller back then maybe they felt more personal? i think the novelty of games like doom is a bit exaggerated. there were realtime 3d games long before and when computers became fast enough to do things like texture mapping the logical progression happened. and some things you mention are quite wrong. like: Quote:
You did not have to worry about the variety of hardware that we do today (i.e. no one had 3D video cards, etc)
maybe doug can say more about this but as far as i know back then it was a lot worse than now. in times of DOS the programmers couldn't simply target directx but had to support and write separate code for a lot of different sound cards, 2d graphics chips,... themselves.
i agree about the team sizes though. maybe this will get better again with more sophisticated tools like jetpackmonkey said. maybe not.
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Re: Where's the Adventure?
[Re: ventilator]
#176989
01/09/08 23:49
01/09/08 23:49
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 8,973
Bay Area
Doug
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Senior Expert
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 8,973
Bay Area
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Quote:
Quote:
You did not have to worry about the variety of hardware that we do today (i.e. no one had 3D video cards, etc)
maybe doug can say more about this but as far as i know back then it was a lot worse than now. in times of DOS the programmers couldn't simply target directx but had to support and write separate code for a lot of different sound cards, 2d graphics chips,... themselves.
No, Dan is mostly right on this.
In the home market, you had a couple of chip-sets (IntelX86, Motorola 68X, etc.), 2-3 sound cards (SoundBlaster being the big one), and that was it.
Somebody with good knowledge in assembly could really squeeze every last cycle from the CPU. The downside was, they had to. Writing a high-performance game in the early 1990s required some serious optimization (which could be a lot of fun, if you like spending hours thinking like a CPU ).
Writing to an API like DirectX is much easier IMHO, but you're not able to squeeze as much performance from the hardware (lucky for us, the hardware is a lot more powerful now). And I can see were that would feel a lot less adventurous.
Dan: If you are missing low-level programming, check out the Cell processor. Not exactly the same thing, but it reminds me a lot of the good-old-days.
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Re: Where's the Adventure?
[Re: Damocles]
#176991
01/10/08 00:41
01/10/08 00:41
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Joined: May 2002
Posts: 7,441
ventilator
Senior Expert
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Senior Expert
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 7,441
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Quote:
In the home market, you had a couple of chip-sets (IntelX86, Motorola 68X, etc.), 2-3 sound cards (SoundBlaster being the big one), and that was it.
and what about graphics chips? some games (i don't remember which ones but i think simcity 2000 was among them) started installation with a list of graphics chips you had to choose from if you wanted to use resolutions higher than 320x200 and more than 16 colors. later more and more graphics chips supported the vesa standard.
Quote:
Realism in graphics is almost reached.
there still is a long way to go. maybe realtime 3d will move to raytracing in the future. current 3d engines are big complicated hacks which have to do a lot of faking. raytracing would be much simpler and nicer once the hardware is fast enough.
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Re: Where's the Adventure?
[Re: PHeMoX]
#176994
01/10/08 05:36
01/10/08 05:36
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 11,321
Virginia, USA
Dan Silverman
OP
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OP
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 11,321
Virginia, USA
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Quote:
to me it sounds like you have some kind of a midlife crisis.
Probably .
Quote:
there are a lot of exciting and adventurous things happening now. people share more ideas and code than ever before. since the communities were smaller back then maybe they felt more personal?
It could be. I might also have felt different for a few reasons that come to mind: 1) it was all new to me, so I am sure I approached it differently than I do know and 2) there were a lot less people trying to make money from it or making a living doing it (i.e. not many were experts).
Quote:
and some things you mention are quite wrong. like:
Quote:
You did not have to worry about the variety of hardware that we do today (i.e. no one had 3D video cards, etc)
maybe doug can say more about this but as far as i know back then it was a lot worse than now. in times of DOS the programmers couldn't simply target directx but had to support and write separate code for a lot of different sound cards, 2d graphics chips,... themselves.
Doug already talked about this, but one thing that we need to remember is many of the different video cards were accessed via the same "generic" VESA or UniVBE driver (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE).
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Dan: If you are missing low-level programming, check out the Cell processor. Not exactly the same thing, but it reminds me a lot of the good-old-days.
Argh! No! I don't program. I do graphics .
Quote:
and what about graphics chips? some games (i don't remember which ones but i think simcity 2000 was among them) started installation with a list of graphics chips you had to choose from if you wanted to use resolutions higher than 320x200 and more than 16 colors. later more and more graphics chips supported the vesa standard.
If you are talking about SimCity 2000 (or any of the other SimCity games) then you are already talking about something much newer than what I was talking about. In any case, most of the games seemed to rely on VESA or UniVBE, as I mentioned above. There were really only a few video cards and, as pointed out previously, they were not 3D cards.
Quote:
i think the novelty of games like doom is a bit exaggerated. there were realtime 3d games long before and when computers became fast enough to do things like texture mapping the logical progression happened.
First of all, DOOM was not 3D at all (though I understand that some have tried to say the opposite). DOOM was a raycasting engine. As such, the levels were developed completely in a 2D, top-down mode. A ray was cast from the players perspective and, when it intersected a boundary, a "wall" was projected vertically. The wall had no thickness. DOOM was technically a 2D game that fooled you into thinking it was 3D. Even the monsters were 2D sprites (and basically the walls were as well). For this reason, DOOM broke the mold. Real-time 3D games followed and further defined the genre.
While other real-time 3D engines may have been there before DOOM/QUAKE, etc, DOOM is the one most recognize because it was successful on so many levels. I don't think DOOM's contribution to 3D gaming is exaggerated.
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Re: Where's the Adventure?
[Re: Dan Silverman]
#176995
01/10/08 06:49
01/10/08 06:49
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Joined: May 2002
Posts: 7,441
ventilator
Senior Expert
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Senior Expert
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 7,441
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i was still quite young back then but i vaguely remember lists with "s3, trident, cirrus logic,..." you had to choose from and most of the time the graphics card i had caused troubles. later it got better with VESA but sometimes there still were problems and you had to play around with software like display doctor. and at the time of quake 1 the first 3d-accelerators came up and this really was a mess with proprietary 3d apis like speedy3d and glide. so i don't really believe that times were better in this regard. except if that is what you mean with adventurous. i also heard from programmers that DOS development was a pain. all this dos-extender stuff, bad debugging solutions,... didn't carmack use some very expensive NeXT machine for development and always cross compile to DOS since DOS was too crappy to work with? for most bedroom or garage developers a $10k NeXT box wasn't really affordable.
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