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Doing some 2D game dev without an engine was the most humbling experience that showed me just how ridiculously fast computers have become. You do things that yo
by Waterluvian 3y ago
Doing some 2D game dev without an engine was the most humbling experience that showed me just how ridiculously fast computers have become. You do things that you swear are far too slow to work, and yet it works even on a Game Boy because it’ll do a million operations in a second and a million is apparently a big number.
“Wait… so I’m looking up and drawing every sprite every time? There’s no clever diffing happening to know which ones to change? There’s no second buffer to reference the previous frame and steal work from?!” And then you find the much more complex games that do start using these tricks and it’s ridiculous.
- johnnyanmac 3y agowell, there ARE some very interesting tricks back in the old days on both the application and hardware side to help out with these exact problems (for one thing, this is exactly how a SpriteAtlas as a data structure is utilized. Why waste time uploading a dozen sprites that usually render in a predictable way when you can upload one big image and sample parts of the image?). But in terms of today, yes. You can certainly brute force render 99% of anything from 15+ years ago on modest commercial hardware (i.e. not even gaming PCs) by drawing and re-drawing a scene.
- RaftPeople 3y agoI got my start doing 2D games on the TRS80 color computer and it really gave me a good foundational understanding of computers. Because it was just bare hardware and assembly, you had to do everything manually, graphics, sound, input, memory mgmt, etc. I think an ideal intro for programming would be if there was an environment where a new programmer could handle all of these things to create a 2D game, but in a simplified way, so they could get the idea without having too much excess baggage just to make it work.