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[–] 297 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 130 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    SMB had game file size limitations in the dozens of kilobytes range.

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  • [–] 160 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    For comparison, that screenshot is 342kb, and Super Mario Bros is 40kb. The screenshot is more than 8.5 times bigger than the game it comes from.

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  • [–] 94 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I managed to recreate almost the same screenshot in 5kb (and with much less compression artifacts!)

    before adding the text and circles it was only 1.6kb

    it's a case where jpeg compression ironically results in the picture getting 60x larger and more blurry because everyone recompresses the images and jpeg is designed for large photos and not pixel art

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  • [–] 37 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Use png and IDK I don't remember which cmd line soft but it stripped out unused colors and compressed images like that one hard.

    That, without the red lines and circles, and without jpeg jitter should be like 1kb. Or less less.

    Now, as an oldtimer, when you load that 1kb image up, it will still take like 640x320 bytes (it was all 8bit) so 200KB of RAM. But back in the day I guess it was more like the original GB 160x144 so 22.5KB RAM needed to show that image.

    Did it work like that?

    No, because cartridges didn't have a lot of space, and the consoles didn't have much RAM, so you used tiles. You had a tile map image, each tile was 8x8 pixels pointing to a palette (so you could use 4-bits for the color. More or less so, there were a lot of 'modes'). Each tile had a number and your screen was some 20x18 tiles x 1 byte numbers, designing the 'tile' to be shown at that particular position of the screen.

    All done by hardware so way fast!

    To make the scrolling run you had a 'delta' pixels to slightly move the "screen" around.

    Fun times.

    Time to go to bed 😪😴

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  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Modern AAA games need optimisations too

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What I would give to have modern devs work that hard to reduce file sizes

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  • [–] 175 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I've seen this same suggestion years ago on Blender tutorials. Generating a scene isn't about making it realistic, it's about fooling the audience into thinking it's real without making it too hard to create. Look at videos from Ian Hubert on how to fake it well.

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  • [–] 92 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Halo 3 came out 17 years ago. I learned this today (and still don't really see it...), so I say they did amazingly well!

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  • [+] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They did this in the Hitman 1>2>3 progression and got H3 down to like... 36 gigs... they reused doors when posssible, fruits in bowls, etc. Instead of bespoke items for each game in the series, they compressed and repeated stuff, and got the entire trilogy game down to the size of one of the individual games.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    I just got back into H3 a week or two ago and was caught off guard by the install size! Last time I installed 2 I had to disable a ton of map DLCs and rotate em out as I went to not take up most of the storage on my Steam Deck SD card.

    They did an amazing job on streamlining things.

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  • [–] 144 points 2 years ago

    Welcome to gamedev. Its all smoke, mirrors, and magic tricks. Come intervene in our fancy electric rock dreams.

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  • [–] 92 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You want them to pay to design TWO ROCKS???? What are they, billionaires???

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  • [–] 80 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    The monkey's paw curls. New AAA games now feature thousands of individual rock models, among other labor- and space-saving measures being forgone in favor of realism. The game is 400 GB and the devs have worked 110 hours per week for the last 3 months

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    There was a game that came out a few years ago that scanned in most of its rocks for photorealism. I can’t recall the name. EA was the publisher, I think?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Tons of games do that now. Usually they get scans and models from other companies, like Quixel Mega scans. It makes for a relatively fast workflow. Pretty much any photo-real game is doing something like this, it's just more affordable than paying people to digitally sculpt rocks by hand.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago

    Setting aside that asset production is genuinely one of the most expensive parts of game dev, if they're smart they can use some clever GPU instancing to improve performance by reusing assets

    No clue if that's happening here, though

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  • [–] 76 points 2 years ago

    I honestly don't see the similarity. So nice rotating, scaling, moving skills I guess.

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  • [–] 75 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Generally more than half of the rock is underground, so while it might be only one rock, you see many distinct sides of it...

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The desks in Skyrim are just clouds embedded in the ground and recoloured.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The desks are clouds...? How would clouds even remotely look like desks??

    Was this supposed to say rocks? I'm so confused 😅

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think the joke here is that in Super Mario Bros (NES), the bushes are recolored clouds, with their bottoms hidden by the ground. By changing the reference to Skyrim, you get a surrealist joke.

    Anyway, that's what I thought the reference was and it made me heartily lol!

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    And we had to share the rock

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    [–] 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    This is literally every game with rocks, since fucking forever..

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Lmao, done that before. You do have to worry about the resolution of the textures when changing the model's size, though.

    Also, I've made small caves systems and mountains like this, before slapping myself for not remembering terrain generation.

    Edit: this is a bit of tangent, but I'm super excited to see more boulders rendered using polycam. Generally, the models are a bit janky and never have straight polygons (along the x,y,z axis) So things like furniture and corridors won't work. Boulders though, it's perfect!

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    [+] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)
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