Bloat is real. Helldivers 2 recently managed to cut their game size from 154GB to just 23GB.
Did they do the “holding up a giant pair of trousers” pic for this weight loss journey?
I assume it’s the way assets are packed/compressed to enable more efficient loading on HDDs, duplicating the same files multiple times and packing them in different combinations depending on the level or whatever being loaded to reduce seek time etc.
It’s been a thing since CD-ROMs. Once SSDs are the norm, hopefully we’ll see games finally debloat themselves and store one copy of their files.
Then give me the option to unpack that game if I’m on a HDD and install the small version otherwise…?
Mario64 is a very cool example, because it was actually bloated and unoptimized AF.
Now this isn’t really the fault of anyone, as it was a brand new architecture and the devs were still figuring out how all the 3D stuff worked. The N64 was also designed with some very cool features that could do so much, but were very hard for developers to understand. This made it so the features were often not used or used incorrectly, leading to sub-par results. With Mario64 being tied to the launch of the N64, the deadlines were also tight, so I think the team did a good job with all of those circumstances.
However these days we have this genius of a person called Kaze, who has pulled the whole game apart and documented all of the weird stuff in there. They have fixed bugs, optimized stuff and added a bunch of new features and systems. These days they pretty much have their own game engine, which runs at high framerates on original hardware with visuals that would have blown people away back in the day. They have also demonstrated that with a couple of fixes, the original release of Mario64 could have ran at framerates approaching 60fps in most circumstances. This is very far from the, at times, terrible framerates it actually ran at. Not that it would have mattered much, our minds were blown by the 3D visuals at the time, framerates didn’t matter that much. But it’s still very cool to think about what could have been.
If you are interested in stuff like this, they have a very good YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@kazen64
They are next level in their programming skills and knowledge of both N64 hardware and software and use these powers to tell other people about it and create awesome games themselves.
That is cool AF. Is there somewhere to grab the ROM that he put together? I don’t see it in the video detailing all the optimisations or on his GitHub.
It isn’t released yet. I expect when it actually comes out you’ll see it all over the gaming internet.
I remember when i upgraded my private machine to a whopping 18MB for a good months income. I had more RAM at home than the company in all their servers in total!
Back in my day, we had floppy’s of 172 kB, 64 kB internal memory and 16 colors!
